Meredith was in a very silent bit of the way when he came to this hypothesis, and its effect upon him was such that he stopped short and laughed aloud. Mrs. Harwood, the most irreproachable of women and mothers, more than middle-aged, never moving out of her wheeled chair! That she should have a postscriptal romance—a love-affair in her fifties: and that the man should go mad—of love probably—and be guarded thus as the apple of her eye! She seemed to rise before him in all her comfortable ease and motherliness—poor lady! not able to walk—to rebuke the wild imagination. He laughed, but then all at once became grave again: for that same easy-minded woman, the respectable mother, the elderly mistress of so correct a household, must be in the mystery one way or another. She it must be who had settled and arranged the whole elaborate business. It could not be Vicars, who was a man-servant in no way above the level of his class. He could not have done it; could not have the means to do it, or the knowledge. The mistress of the house must be involved. Her purse and her brain must be in it, whoever the mysterious patient or prisoner was. Who was the man? Beyond that question Meredith, with all his acuteness, could not go.
What a strange sight it was, looking in at him through the curtains! Meredith said to himself that the man must have been drugged to lie in such a deep stupor of sleep. Something must have been given to him to keep him quiet, to make it possible to fill a house in which such an inmate was, with music and the sound of the dancers’ feet and the hum of a lively crowd. And the incredible rashness, temerity, of doing so—of carrying on all the gayeties of life in a house occupied by such a spectre, on the other side of the wall only from the unconscious merrymakers! It was like a woman to do that, with a regardlessness of all consequences, a want of natural logic which belonged only to women: for everybody surely must see that one time or other such a thing must be found out. Nothing in the whole matter was so certain as that—that one time or other it was bound to be found out. It was like a woman to do it: but even a woman, one would have thought, possessing such a secret would shut her house up and keep society at least at arm’s length. But no; on the contrary, all sorts of pleasant things went on in the house. It was open to all the friends of the young people, who visited it, stayed in it, came there as freely as to the most commonplace of houses. And all the time that man shut up in the wing! Any one of them might have pushed open the door at some careless moment as Janet and he had done, and found his or her way upstairs. Any one of them might have seen the spectre, so notable as he was in appearance; not a face to forget. And what then?
But Mrs. Harwood, with the incredible inconsequence of a woman, had ignored all that. No doubt Vicars, to spare himself trouble, had got into a way of leaving the door unfastened, the spring uncaught, to save himself trouble. And they thought they never would be found out. They gave dinners and dances and asked all sorts of people to come and pass within sound of the maniac. They might drug him, but they could not drug the spectators, who, one time or other, as sure as Nemesis, must have found out—as Charley had done.
But who was the man?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Janet had been so quickly summoned downstairs after her strange adventure that she had no leisure to think it over, until, about the time when Mr. Meredith set out on his walk, she escaped upstairs. Meredith had been the very last to go away, he had stayed for the little family supper which the house-party had made after the guests were gone. He was evidently regarded, in short, entirely as one of the family, and in that capacity claimed Mrs. Harwood’s applause for his exertions in making everything “go off.”
“I have danced with all the plainest women,” he said, “and taken at least three dowagers in to supper. I ought to be very much petted now to make up.”
Mrs. Harwood looked from him to Gussy uncertain what to reply. But Gussy did not meet her mother’s eyes, as she most certainly would have done had there been anything to tell.
“Oh, yes, you have been of great use,” she said, “I don’t know what we should have done without you. But I don’t believe in such magnanimity as that. And you ought to be more civil about the dowagers when you are talking to me.”
“You are not a dowager—you are the head of the house,” Meredith said, bending over her affectionately to say good-night.