She sat down meekly in it at once, and smiled at him—not displeased at being dragooned.
He smiled back, and was gone. She heard him go cautiously along the passage, and open and shut the front door.
The light was increasing steadily, and a few minutes after he had left the house the sun came pallidly out, and a faint breeze stirred the tops of the fir trees. Perhaps this was the land breeze of which he had spoken. A sense of irksomeness and restlessness laid hold on her. She turned from the window, and wandered into the little entrance hall, and unbarred a shutter to see if Roger were coming back. But no one was in sight on the long, straight, moss-rutted road that led to the house. She peered into the empty kitchen, and then, seeing a band of sunlight on the staircase, went up it. Perhaps she should see Roger from one of the upper windows. There were no shutters on them. She glanced into one after another of the little cluster of dishevelled bedrooms, with crumpled newspapers left over from a hurried packing still strewing the floors. The furniture was massive, early Victorian, not uncomfortable, but direfully ugly.
There was one fair-sized south bedroom, and on the window-sill was a young starling with outspread, grimy wings. Annette ran to open the window, but as she did so she saw it was dead, had died beating against the glass trying to get out into the sunshine, after making black smirches on the walls and ceiling.
Everything in this one room was gay and pretty. The curtains and bed-hangings were of rosebud chintz. Perhaps the same hand that had made them had collected from the other rooms the old swinging mirror with brass rosettes, and the chest of drawers with drop handles, and the quaint painted chairs. Annette saw the crib in the corner. This room had been the nursery. It was here, no doubt, that Mrs. Deane had watched her child die. Some of the anguish of the mother seemed to linger in the sunny room with its rose-coloured curtains, and something, alas! more terrible than grief had left its traces there.
A devastating hand, a fierce destructive anger had been at work. Little pictures had evidently been torn down from the wall and flung into the fire. The fireplace was choked high with half-burned débris—small shoes, pinafores, and toys. A bit of a child's linen picture-book had declined to burn, and hung forlornly through the bars, showing a comic picture of Mrs. Pig driving home from market. A green wheel had become unfastened, and had rolled into the middle of the room when the wooden horse and cart were thrust into the fire.
"She must have cried all the time," said Annette to herself, and she shivered. She remembered her own mad impulse of destruction.
"It's no use being angry," she whispered to the empty walls. "No use. No use."
The photograph frames had evidently been swept into the fire too, all but one, for there was broken glass in the fender and on the floor. But one framed photograph stood on the mantelpiece, the man in it, smiling and debonair, looking gaily out at Annette and the world in general. Under it was written in a large clear hand, "Daddy."
It was Dick Le Geyt, but younger and handsomer than Annette had ever known him. She looked long at it, slowly realizing that this, then, had been the home of Dick's mistress, the Mary of whom he had spoken and her child, to whom he had done a tardy justice in his will, the will she had helped him to make. The child, Dick's child, was dead. Its empty crib was in the corner. Its memorials had perished with it.