Some one else had dressed quickly too. The echo of men's voices rose presently from the verandah below. She recognized them with a start as Creagh's unmistakable chuckle of delight broke out at something Farquharson said. Then the younger man pulled his chair forward—she heard the sound grate on the stone—and took up the thread of talk again with an alert and interested air. Evelyn, curiously tired, listened for a moment to the murmur of voices without taking in the full significance of words which occasionally reached her. Creagh seemed to be unfolding some plan of campaign, to which Farquharson said but little in reply. His tone was deliberate and extraordinarily final; one or two words reached Evelyn clearly. She drew back further into the shadow, fearful of playing the part of eavesdropper.
The frayed edge of her gown, mended and adapted almost beyond recognition, caught her eye. She went to her work-basket and mended it mechanically. It was draped with the lace of her mother's and her own wedding veil, and sweet with the scent of lavender bags where it had been laid. The skirt was made from the fifteen-year-old Court train of her bridal gown; a pearl spray clasping the flowers at her breast was one of Creagh's numerous wedding gifts, her fan and handkerchief another. Every appointment of her dress to-night recalled her marriage. The maid had put out another gown upon the bed, which Mrs. Brand had discarded, choosing by preference that which she had worn the night before. Evelyn had to practise every pitiful little shift of poverty "to keep up an appearance."
Only Henry Brand knew the precise amount of their income. Its fluctuations and diminutions were a constant terror to his wife. There were times when money, obtained how she did not know, seemed fairly plentiful; again, at other times, her desk was laden with unpaid bills, and she worked far into the night to make the money wherewith to meet them. She photographed and painted, and could turn her hand to journalism as easily as to upholstery. Accustomed to do without from childhood, she had limited her personal wants to absolute necessities; she was, moreover, a practical woman who could cook and sew or do housework better than most of the people she employed.
A world which generally expels its social paupers was singularly lenient to the Brands. Some of the great ladies of the land drove down at night to the tiny flat in West Kensington, where Evelyn dispensed hock-cup and home-made cakes, without a murmur; it was said that two young duchesses, rival beauties, had come incognita on one occasion behind thick veils inside a motor 'bus. The latest explorer, the coming man, gravitated naturally to a place where every guest was made to feel individually welcome. Evelyn's reunions recalled something of the famous salons of the past. Her tact and sympathy drew opposing bodies together; the little circle had grown from a mere gathering of intimate friends to be the coveted goal of those who wished to meet important persons on an easy and natural footing. Converging opinions met and mixed here like rivers in the sea.
Mighty political battles had been fought out in Evelyn's presence. A famous K.C., with more truth than gallantry, boasted openly that she was the one woman in England who was just and temperate in argument, and the present Prime Minister had said he would drive willingly four miles farther out of London to be welcomed by such a hostess at the end. Unlike most women, technicalities did not alarm her. Men who came to discuss their business investments found in her as ready a listener as men of action. Nor did she shun, although she never actually invited, the confidences of her own sex. The pain of others hurt her physically; to give real sympathy is, after all, to let "virtue go out of one." Most men and women shun sorrow as if it were leprosy. But in the bank of feeling Evelyn's account was always overdrawn.
It was certainly a point in Henry Brand's favour that he had so early foreseen his wife's possibilities.
His one brief hour of popularity had long since passed. There were unpleasant stories about him. He was, for instance, sole trustee under his father's will, and the money was equally divided between himself and the two unmarried daughters, at whose deaths it would revert to him, failing their marriages, in which case the husbands would have life-interests in the estate, and, if there were issue, the children would eventually succeed. The younger of the two Miss Brands was fragile and delicate; a course of the systematic bullying and petty tyrannies by which a man can make his sisters' lives unbearable, made her run away one night and take refuge in a convent, whose stern régime presently brought about her death. The elder sister, stronger in will and brain, was more difficult to deal with; but there are many forms of cruelty practised by those amongst whom we live unrecognized by the law, and which the law has so far never punished. Brand made this woman's life a martyrdom; her every action was thwarted, and every pleasure arrested midway towards its fulfilment. In time her spirit broke. She lived with him because she could never break away; unluckily for her, she had none of that special knowledge which enables a better educated woman to make her own way in the world, and defy those enemies of the household who can be the most bitter and unyielding. Marian Brand was found in bed one morning dead, with a broken bottle of chloral at her side. Brand was the first to break into the room. Accustomed to come down late he had missed his sister's usual preparations for his comfort. The frightened servants at his heels never saw him pick up a letter addressed to himself which lay upon the bed, and which he presently destroyed.
But trustees who benefit by certain deaths under a will must needs go warily, and facts like these leak out in time, however carefully concealed. Brand, pleasantly aware of the world's forgetfulness found it advisable to travel abroad for a while.
It was not, indeed, until after his marriage that he was again universally received. Even now he was only allowed access to the houses where Evelyn was a popular guest because from the first she had refused all invitations which did not include him. The position galled him, although he made the best of it; he had aged of late years, his limp becoming daily more prominent, and the stoop from the shoulders stiffening with time.
Evelyn herself seldom looked back or forward, but to-night, for some unknown reason, as she sat in the dusk by the open window, a tide of memory swept her along to the shore of her youth. Past days of dreams and personal ambitions—how far she had drifted from them lately! The red and black days which marked special epochs, beginning with her childhood in the convent and ending with her marriage, came before her in a series of pictures. She looked at her dead youth, and felt anew the shocks that killed it.