CHAPTER XII
On Monday morning he went up to town without seeing her again. Tuesday he got that fateful telegram:
Stevens seen man hanging about house, shabby peering man. Questioned cook. Sick with fear. Send back all my letters at once by special messenger. In panic. On no account come down or near me but letters urgent.
Stevens had told her in the evening whilst putting her to bed. Stevens knew all about the case and was alert for possible complications. The shabby man had been under the observation of cook and housemaid.
“And much satisfaction he got out of what they told him. Askin’ questions an’ peerin’ about! Cook told him off, said no one hadn’t been stayin’ here, an’ if they had ’twas no business of his.”
Margaret, pale and stricken, asked if the man looked like ... like a detective.
“Lawyer’s clerk more like, but I thought I’d best let you know.”
The news would have kept until the morning, but one could not expect a servant to take into consideration the effect her stories might have on Margaret’s sensitiveness. She had no sleep at all. Sleepless and shaken she lay awake the whole night, conjuring up ghosts, chiefly the ghost or vision of James, coarse-mouthed, cruel, vindictive. The bare idea of the case being reopened made her shudder, she had been so tormented in court, her modesties outraged. She knew she could never, would never bear it again. If the dreadful choice were all that was left to her she would give up Gabriel. At the thought of giving up Gabriel it seemed there was nothing else for which she cared, nothing on earth.
She conjured up not only ghosts but absurdities. The shabby peering man would go to Hampstead, question Gabriel’s silly sister, be shown letters. This was more than she could bear. On the last occasion letters of hers had been read in court; love letters to James! She cringed in her bed at the remembrance of them. And what had she written to Gabriel? Not one word came back to her of anything she had written. At first she knew they had been laboured letters, laboured or literary. But since she had been down here, and Peter Kennedy, by sheer force of contrast, had taught her how much she could care for a really good and clever man, she had written with entire unrestraint, freely.
She wrote that telegram to Gabriel Stanton at four o’clock in the morning, going down to the drawing-room for a telegram form in dressing-gown and slippers, her hair in two plaits, shivering with cold and apprehension. The house was full of eerie sounds; she heard pursuing feet. After she had secured the forms she rushed for the shelter of her room and the warmth of her bed; cowering under the clothes, not able for a long time to do the task she had set herself. When she became sufficiently rested she took more time and care over the wording of her telegram to Gabriel than she might have done over a sonnet. She wanted to say just enough, not too much, not to bring him down, yet to make the matter urgent. Stevens was rung for at six o’clock for tea and perhaps sympathy.