CHAPTER XXXII.
THE CLOSING OF THE GATE.
While Lady Graves was standing at the Bradmouth station on that Saturday in November, waiting for the London train, she saw a man whose face she knew and who saluted her with much humility. He was dressed in a semi-clerical fashion, in clothes made of smooth black cloth, and he wore a broad wide-awake, the only spot of colour about him being a neck scarf of brilliant red, whereof the strange incongruity caught and offended her eye. For a long time she puzzled herself with endeavours to recollect who this individual might be. He did not look like a farmer; and it was obvious that he could not belong to the neighbouring clergy, since no parson in his senses would wear such a tie. Finally Lady Graves concluded that he must be a dissenting minister, and dismissed the matter from her mind. At Liverpool Street, however, she saw him again, although he tried to avoid her, or so she thought; and then it flashed across her that this person was Mr. Samuel Rock of Moor Farm, and she wondered vaguely what his business in London could be.
Had Lady Graves possessed the gift of clairvoyance she would have wondered still more, for Mr. Rock’s business was curiously connected with her own, seeing that he also had journeyed to town, for the first time in his life, in order to obtain an interview with Joan Haste, whose address he had purchased at so great a price on the previous day. As yet he had no very clear idea of what he should say or do when he found himself in Joan’s presence. He knew only that he was driven to seek that presence by a desire which he was absolutely unable to control. He loved Joan, not as other men love, but with all the strength and virulence of his distempered nature; and this love, or passion, or incipient insanity, drew him to her with as irresistible a force as a magnet draws the fragment of steel that is brought within its influence. Had he known her to be at the uttermost ends of the earth, it would have drawn him thither; and though he was timid and fearful of the vengeance of Heaven, there was no danger that he would not have braved, and no crime which he would not have committed, that he might win her to himself.
Till he learned to love Joan Samuel Rock had been as free from all human affections as it is possible for a man to be; there was no one creature for whom he cared, and, though he was naturally passionate, his interests and his strict religious training had kept him from giving way to the excesses that in secret he brooded over and desired. During his early manhood all his energies had been devoted to moneymaking, and in the joy of amassing wealth and of overreaching his fellows in every kind of legitimate business he found consolation for the absence of all that in the case of most men makes life worth living. Then on one evil day he met Joan, grown from a child into a most lovely woman; and that which he had hidden in his heart arose suddenly and asserted itself, so that from this hour he became a slave bound to the chariot-wheels of a passion over which he had lost command. The rebuffs that he had received at her hands served only to make the object of his affections dearer and more desirable in his eyes, while the gnawing ache of jealousy and the daily torment of long-continued disappointment drove him by slow degrees to the very edge of madness. She hated him, he knew, as he knew that she loved his rival; but if only he could see her, things might yet go well with him, or if they did not, at least he would have seen her.
But of all this Lady Graves was ignorant, and, had she known it, anxious though she was to win her end, it is probable that she would have shrunk from an enterprise which, if successful, must expose Joan Haste to the persecution of such a man as Samuel Rock, and might end in delivering her into his hands.
On the following afternoon—it was Sunday—Lady Graves informed her hostess that she was going to visit a friend, and, declining the offer of the carriage, walked to the corner of the square, where she chartered a four-wheeled cab, directing the driver to take her to Kent Street. As they crawled up the Edgware Road she let down the window of the cab and idly watched the stream of passers-by. Presently she started, for among the hundreds of faces she caught sight of that of Mr. Samuel Rock. It was pale, and she noticed that as he went the man was muttering to himself and glancing at the corner of a street, as though he were seeking some turn with which he was not familiar.
“I wonder what that person is doing here,” she thought to herself; “positively he seems to haunt me.” Then the cab went on, and presently drew up in front of No. 8, Kent Street.
“What a squalid-looking place!” Lady Graves reflected, while she paid the man and rang the bell.
As it chanced, Mrs. Bird was out and the door was answered by the little serving girl, who, in reply to the question of whether Miss Haste was in, said “Yes” without hesitation and led the way upstairs.
“Some one to see you,” she said, opening the door in front of Lady Graves and almost simultaneously shutting it behind her.