For her, anything of that kind would be fatal, too. She must not look before or after. It was like crossing an abyss on a narrow plank. Her resolve taken, her plan formed, one pang of indecision might paralyze a nerve upon which all chance of safety depended. And she must act without an instant’s delay.
She listened for the click of the front door. And then from the discreet ambush of the charming new curtains of that singularly pleasant room, in which so lately as two days ago, each individual object had been a thing of delight, she watched her husband’s tall and picturesque figure disappear round the corner of the Square into the Brompton Road. Then she went to the telephone at once and rang up Freeman’s Hotel.
It seemed an age before her demand to speak with Mr. Hierons could be met. A voice was not sure whether Mr. Hierons was now staying at the hotel, but it would find out. He had been away some days and the voice rather fancied that he had not yet returned. Minutes passed. And then in the midst of a baffled impotence that was almost a fever now, to Helen’s unspeakable relief, a tone she faintly recognized said, “Are you there?”
George Hierons was speaking. If Mrs. Endor cared to come round at once to the hotel he would be glad to wait in for her.
L
ON the way to Freeman’s Hotel in a taxi, Helen did her best to remember that she still lived and moved and had her being in twentieth century London. She tried hard to keep all the simple and familiar realities before her mind. Everything looked so oddly different now from what it had done less than three hours ago when she had driven west from St. Pancras station, that such a ritual seemed necessary. She was plunged in a state of affairs whose fantastic horror it was hardly possible for a mind so sane as hers to exaggerate. It was like living in a nightmare, except that it was much more vivid. But when everything around, the rattle of the taxi, the London mud, the raw air, had convinced her that she was truly awake, she might have bartered her immortal soul to believe otherwise.
George Hierons, who was living en suite, received Helen in his own private sitting room. He greeted her with a cordial tenderness which could only have sprung from the regard of an honest and a good man. Yet hardly a glance was needed to tell her that not a little of her own acute distress was shared by a true friend.
The face of George Hierons was that of a highly sensitive man who was suffering acutely. His visitor was struck by a tragic change in his appearance. Eyes and cheeks had deep hollows, their lines a look of age that mere years did not warrant; and underlying a strong and beautiful face was a torment of pain, stifled and repressed, that Helen could not bear to see.
She had the courage to begin with a conventional remark. But Hierons at once made clear that there was no need to withhold anything. He took her hands gently in his own.
“You have done a wise thing in coming to see me,” he said without a word of preface. “Tell me just how much you know.”