“Oh, confound your confidence. Where is my wife?” Rowland cried.
“I do not know,” said Marion primly. She added after a moment, staccato—“But I might give a guess: she was awfully taken up—- about Archie, papa.”
He uttered a sort of groan, looking fiercely at her, not missing a shade of meaning in Marion’s face.
“And she wanted me to interfere: but I just said that what papa decided must be right, and I would have nothing to do with it—against you. And then she was in great thought.—Did you ever hear, papa, that before she was married, mamma and Mr. Saumarez, their father, were great friends?”
“What has that to do with it?” he cried angrily.
“Well—there was some story Eddy always said, and he used to laugh; but he never would tell me right out: and he said he could make her do whatever he liked on that account. And last night she asked Rosamond a great many questions about when he was coming home and so forth, and I heard her say something about ‘your father’s advice.’”
James Rowland sprang to his feet with the suppressed roar of feeling, which in men of this kind does duty for the sigh or outcry of milder natures. There was something of the wild beast in it,—an impulse of rage, almost frenzy. Advice with that man on his affairs! take that vile cynic, that false traitor, that diseased atomy into her confidence on her husband’s decent concerns! His looks terrified his daughter; and as he paced about the room up and down, Marion took advantage of the first occasion on which he turned his back to her to escape. But Rowland did not even remark that she was gone. Oh, Evelyn! Evelyn! whom he trusted to the bottom of his heart, had she gone to expose the secrets of his house, his shame, and the breaking of his heart to that man! This shaft went to his very soul.
CHAPTER XLI.
Evelyn arrived in London on a dark morning of early November, having travelled all night; but she scarcely so much as thought of her fatigue, and still less of the heavy yellow atmosphere, as she drove to the hotel where she had lived with her husband on their first arrival in England, when she knew nothing of the difficulties that were to rise like lions in her way. It had been June then, and everything was fresh and fair. And though even then she had thought with apprehension of the children, wondering whether they would receive her with prejudice, or what she could do to disarm opposition, no thought of anything more serious than the little contrarieties of household intercourse had ever come into her mind. What floods of experience, unthought of, unexpected, had come upon her since that time. Now she had learned to know herself and others, to realize a hundred dangers and difficulties which never had appeared upon her horizon before. Nothing that had happened in her previous life could have made it seem possible to her that she should come back again alone to London, on a sort of detective enterprise in the interests of her husband’s son—who did not love, but distrusted and feared her, though she had thus dared the very real dangers of her husband’s displeasure and her own uneasy sense of unfitness and incapacity, on his behalf. She had thought and thought during the long sleepless night, turning the matter over in every possible view; sometimes appalled at her own hardihood in making such a venture; sometimes feeling that it was the only course she could have pursued; sometimes with a cold shade of self-distrust, asking herself how she could have undertaken it at all, how she could hope to carry it out. And, unfortunately, the more Evelyn thought, the stronger became this latter sentiment: how she was to find Eddy; how she was to begin such an inquiry; how she could put it to him in so many words that it was he who was guilty and not Archie. She had not entered with herself into these details until she had committed herself to this attempt. The question before had been, should she do it? should she take this chance of enlightenment? should she try at least what seemed the only way of attaining any certainty? It had seemed to her before she started, that she had but to be brought face to face with Eddy, to appeal to him and his better impulses in order to know. “If you can throw any light upon it,” she had meant to say; “if you know anything!” And it did not occur to her that he would hesitate to reply. He was lazy, light, unsettled, uncertain—badly trained, poor boy, without much moral sense, not careful to discriminate between right and wrong; but yet at the bottom of all a gentleman, with an instinctive sense of loyalty and truth. The difficulty at first was merely that of going, finding him, venturing upon the solitary journey, acting in her husband’s absence, without his knowledge: all of them very appalling things—for she had never been accustomed to act for herself in any practical emergency, although well enough accustomed to passive endurance of things she could not mend. The sudden sense that here was a thing which perhaps she could mend by sudden action had at first taken away her breath. It had seemed to her inexperience a mighty thing to do, to start off to London all by herself in James’s absence, as if she were running away. It looked like waiting till he was gone, and then taking advantage! She laughed at the suggestion, yet held her breath at the strange risk. He might think—and yet more, the servants might think, who were so apt to find out everything, and a great deal more than there was to find out. These conflicting thoughts had kept her mind in a ferment of anxiety, until she had actually taken that great step and started. And then they had dropped suddenly and given place to a new kind of trouble.
How was she to bring Eddy Saumarez to the bar, to put him to the question, to ask him to incriminate himself or his friends, to demand—What do you know? This new side of the matter rose up as soon as she had fairly begun her journey and caught her by the throat. The face of Eddy rose before her in the partial darkness behind the veiled lamp of the compartment in which she travelled alone. Oh not an easy face to confront, to over-awe, to reach the meaning of! A face that could pucker into humorous lines, that could put on veils of assumed incomprehension, that could look satirically amused, or innocently unconscious, or wildly merry, as it pleased! “What could make you think, dear Mrs. Rowland, that I knew anything?” he would say; or, “It is too delightful that you should have such an opinion of my insight;” or, perhaps, “You know I never learned the very alphabet of Archie, and how can I tell what he would do.” Such expressions she had heard from him often on other subjects, upon which he could baffle her smilingly, looking in her face all the time. And how could she hope to keep him to the point now, to bring him to a serious answer, to convince him of the importance of the position and the need there was that he should speak? In the middle of the journey her courage had so evaporated that she had almost determined to return again without making this unhopeful attempt. But there are always as many, or perhaps more, difficulties in the way of going back than there are in going forward, and Evelyn felt that she had committed herself too much to make it possible that she should go back. She drove to the hotel, and had her bath and changed her dress, and swallowed hurriedly that cup of tea which is the only sustenance possible in a moment of anxiety to so many women. And then she walked from the hotel to the insignificant fashionable street in which the house of Mr. Saumarez was. It was a small house, though the locality was irreproachable, and the blinds of the first floor were all carefully drawn down, though there were indications of life in the other parts. Evelyn’s knock was answered after a considerable interval by the old woman, caretaker or charwoman, who was left in charge when “the family” were absent. “Mr. Edward?” she said; “Mr. Eddy?—yes’m, he’s at ‘ome; but he’s not up yet, and won’t be this three or four hours.”