Randolph picked up a book from the table, and examined its title, then laid it down again, and turned it over.
“I have never yet broken my word,” he said.
Lee flashed him a glance full of tears and tribute. Then once more that night she shook hands with a man who was sick with the bitterness of life.
She left the library and went rapidly down the corridor. As she passed Lord Barnstaple’s door she noted with gratitude that there was no sign of discovery. If the blow could be softened it was by her alone.
She was traversing the last corridor but one when her eyes were arrested by the chapel and the churchyard on the hill. She paused a moment and regarded them intently. A week from to-night she and her husband would follow Lord Barnstaple up that hill to the vault beneath the chapel’s altar. She had hardly realised his death before, but that solitary hill, cold under the moonlight, cold in its bosom, coldly biding its Maundrells, generation after generation, century after century, made the tragedy of the earl’s death one of the several sharply-cut facts of her life. They were five; she counted them mechanically: the violent death of her father, her meeting with Cecil, the death of her mother, her union with her husband, the violent death of her husband’s father. There was certainly a singular coincidence between the first and the last.
As she continued to look out at the graveyard, dark even under the moon, and wondering if the next great fact in her life would be the birth of a child, to be borne up that hill supinely in his turn, following the father who had gone long since, she became aware that the word coincidence was swinging to and fro in her mind, although the other words of its company had gone to their dust-heap. She frowned and reproached herself for giving way to melancholy; then reflected that she would be less than mortal if she did not ... the reiteration of the word annoyed her, and in a moment she had fitted it into her conversation with Lord Barnstaple that afternoon.
Her stiffening eyes returned to the hill, and their vision stabbed through the mounds to the bones of the abbots, whose brothers had cursed the Abbey. It had been but a coincidence perhaps, but it had worked itself out with astonishing regularity.
Lee became conscious that she was as cold as ice. The Abbey was saved to the Maundrells. Was Cecil dead? Had he died before his father? Nothing could be more unlikely, for he was the healthiest of men, and there was no one to murder him.
She shook herself violently and took her nerves in hand. Two years ago she would have flung off the superstition as quickly, but to-day the old world and all its traditions had taken her imagination into its mould. Had Pix—or that silent, persistent, unfathomable woman, his sister——
She ran towards the tower, gripping her nerves; for if Cecil were there she would have need of all her faculties. It was no part of her programme to burst in upon him and scream and stammer her terrible bulletin. But she was a woman, frightened, horrified, overwrought with hours of nervous tension. When she reached the stair her knees were shaking, and she climbed the long spiral so slowly that she would have called her husband’s name could she have found her voice. She wished she had asked him to write in her boudoir, whose open door was as black as the entrance to a cave; but he was—should be—in his own little sitting-room above.