This was the master of the house, though he seemed to whisper to them across an open grave, and here were accents they had not caught before under this roof. It was queer how this little speech appeared to lift a weight, the pressure of something unnamed, from their minds.
‘Did you say—you were husband and wife?’ The whisper came again, after a brief silence, filled with departing images.
‘Yes, we are,’ Margaret replied, very simply, like a child; and Philip felt her hand on his arm. She couldn’t help it; answering that had somehow been like another marriage ceremony, graver than that other in the little church at Otterwell. She thought of that, and then innumerable little pictures flashed across her mind: the two of them dining together that night at the Gare de Lyon; then going through the dust and faerie of Provence; the tiny flat in Doughty Street, with Philip painting the fireplace; the Hampstead house and Betty in the garden; and with all that had not been shared since flitting darkly through her mind like a bad dream.
He spoke again out of the shadow. ‘You are fortunate—very fortunate. I never married. There was—so much to do—but I came—to be very lonely—at last.’ In spite of the frequent pauses, there was no gasping nor obvious effort in his speech, and its faint drip-drip of words gave it a strangely remote, oracular quality. He wasn’t conversing, Philip felt; he was too old for that; there was only time to call faintly from the darkening hillside. Philip didn’t want to move nor even to speak; he only wanted to stand there, staring across the flame of the candle, listening and wondering.
There was a slight stirring in the bed and the hand groped its way towards the little table. Margaret started forward out of her dream and gave him the glass again. This time he leaned further forward than before, and after he had sipped and the glass had been replaced he remained where he was, looking at them, with the light falling on his face. Years and disease had played havoc there, and his eyes were hidden by his thick brows; but, over and above all that, there was a marked difference between him and the other two Femms. They had only a moment, however, in which to return his scrutiny, that curiously impersonal stare of old age, for no sooner had he spoken again than he sank back into the shadow. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he whispered, and then vanished from the light.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Margaret, hastily apologetic. ‘But we couldn’t help it, you know. We were absolutely cut off and had no other place to shelter in.’ She flashed a glance at Philip.
‘It wasn’t a mere matter of comfort,’ he put in, ‘but of escaping from real danger. There was a landslide and a flood.’ He felt as if he were earnestly addressing nothing, as if Sir Roderick had departed and would not return until he was ready to make another remark.
He made another now. But first they saw the hand on the counterpane lifted, presumably to cut short their explanations and apologies. ‘I’m afraid—you misunderstand me,’ he said very slowly. ‘You make me—seem inhospitable. I was never that—never.’ Here they caught the dry husk of a laugh, a ghostly and incredible sound. ‘This house—was always filled with guests—at one time—years ago—many years.’ They could almost hear those years rustling by in the long pauses. And Margaret suddenly thought of Rachel Femm and the young men who came riding in and the women smothered in silks and scents who had laughed at Miss Femm. This room, the whole house, was dimmed and thick with presences, haunted.
‘I wish—I could have—received you,’ the whisper, so curiously remote, began again. ‘But you see, I am—old—ailing—tired now. I have done—with life. No—not quite done. There is always something—we want. Now—it is—a drink of water.’
‘Do you want one now?’ Margaret asked, reaching out for the glass. She did not choose to see beyond the simple need.