He questioned Morris that evening carelessly: ‘Do you remember a lady, Morris, who came here one evening in the dusk? A lady—who insisted on disturbing Mrs. Swinford. Don’t you remember? And by dint of insisting was allowed to go in?’
‘Remember ‘er, sir!’ said Morris, with much emphasis. ‘I should just think I did—as well as I remember my own name.’
‘She has never,’ said Leo, carelessly aiming at a ball on the billiard table, ‘been here again?’
He spoke in so artificially careless a tone to convey no suspicion of any special meaning in the question, that Morris would not have been a man and a butler had he not been put upon the alert.
‘Oh, ‘asn’t she, sir!’ said Morris. ‘I should say, sir, as she’s here most days, is that lady; as if the house was her own——’
‘I have never seen her,’ said Leo, with as natural an expression of surprise as he could put on.
‘No more haven’t I,’ said Morris. ‘Never; and how she gets in and goes out is more nor I can say; but she’s favoured, sir, of course, in the ‘igher suckles; that we know.’
‘Morris, my man,’ said Leo briskly, ‘you forget yourself, I think. I asked you if a lady, who is a friend of my mother’s, had been here again: and you take it upon you to talk of how she comes into the house without attracting your intelligent attention, which was not the question at all.’
‘I ‘umbly beg your pardon, sir,’ said Morris; and here the conversation stayed. Leo felt that he had done as much as in the meantime it was possible to do. His own faculties alone must arrange the rest. Those faculties, thoroughly awakened and put to the sharpest usage that was in them, were, however, of but little use to Leo for a day or two. There could be no doubt, he felt sure, that Artémise was continually in the house. But it was impossible for him to storm his mother’s apartments in search of her, and equally impossible to show himself to a keen-eyed houseful of servants as in waiting to trap her near his mother’s door. The situation was one of the utmost difficulty, and demanded extreme caution, and the only result he attained after twenty-four hours’ sustained observation was that it was possible from Mrs. Swinford’s rooms to reach, without going near the formal entrance, a servants’ door, apparently little used, and which opened at an unfrequented angle of the house, quite apart from the noisy and populous kitchen entrance. He had made up his mind to post himself in the shrubbery close to this door at the hour of dinner, when his mother would imagine him to be occupied with his meal. She had sent down word that she herself was not coming to dinner, and the opportunity seemed propitious. Leo was pondering upon this resolution, and how to carry it out, as he returned from the village, where Lady William had told him that the need for finding Artémise was greater than ever. It was a hazy, rainy evening, not dark, but growing towards dusk, as he walked home soberly under his umbrella, full of this intention. And he had just passed the glimmer of the lake, all dimpled with the circlets of the falling rain, when a movement in the shrubbery behind caught his eye. The bushes were thick there, a heavy bosquet of all the flowering shrubs that make spring delicious, a thicket of lilac and syringa, which extended along the further side of the pretty piece of water. Leo scarcely paused to think, but, putting down his umbrella, and pulling himself together, started at full speed for the house to intercept the visitor who, on whatsoever errand, was making her way towards the back entrance: probably only a servant using the legitimate way. He was not near enough, nor was there light enough to make out absolutely who it was, or, indeed, more than that the figure was that of a woman, covered from head to foot with one of the shapeless garments, ulster or waterproof, which are the habitual wear of a humble class of the community. He managed so well that he reached the neighbourhood of the house sooner than this gliding figure, who was more a movement than a being, and whom, in a less excited state of his nerves, he would probably not have noticed at all. He made for the little entrance which he had discovered and arrived there before her. Would he be convicted of spying by the astonished eyes of some innocent maidservant? Or would he——? What was that? Certainly the movement had been there for a moment in the bushes, and there had been a pause—a pause was it of consternation to see him on the watch? A moment after, he perceived that the almost imperceptible quiver of the pale lilac, washed almost white with the rain, had gone further off; the visitor had retreated. He hurried along in the track, his heart beating. Certainly it was retreating. Down again along the edge of the little lake he followed, cautious, tracking the faint swaying in the branches. If the evening had not been perfectly still, he could not have noted any progress at all, the path of the fugitive was so judiciously chosen. Then he gave almost a shout of satisfaction; skirting among the bushes became no longer practicable, and, trusting to the dark and the rain, an indistinct form suddenly appeared in the open, moving like a shadow, but with great speed, over the grass. He uttered a cry, almost without knowing it, and launched himself forth in pursuit.