If they have quarrelled they will have to make it up again. Perhaps even his laboriously chosen love-gift will not be held a sufficient peacemaker. Perhaps he will have to expend himself in those expletives and asseverations that used once to come so trippingly, nay burningly, from his tongue, but that now have to be driven by main force from his lips, slow and cold and clogged.
A third morning has dawned. Again no letter. It is certainly very strange.
Talbot walks to Downing Street, pondering gravely what can be the cause of this unprecedented silence. Can it be that she is ill? She must be ill indeed not to write to him! A flash of distorted remorse—distorted, since it is for being unable better to return the tenderness of another man's wife—crosses his mind at the thought of her great love for him. No, if she had been ill, too ill to write, Harborough would certainly have sent him word of it, since no one is ever half so anxious to give him tidings of Betty, to further their meetings and impede their partings, as Betty's worthy, blockhead husband. It is most unlikely that the post, which indeed strangely seldom misbehaves itself, should have erred three times running.
He has reached Downing Street before any solution of the problem has occurred to him. In the course of the day he goes very nigh to forgetting it in the absorption of his work. That work is, on this particular day, specially pressing—specially monopolising. From morning to night he has not a moment that he can call his own. He does not even return home to dress for dinner, but snatches a hasty mouthful of food at the House of Commons, whither he has to accompany his chief, who is to speak on a subject at that moment engaging both House and nation's most passionate attention. The House is thronged to hear the great man. He is for three hours on his legs; and his speech is followed by a hot debate, adorned by the usual accompaniments of senseless obstruction, indecent clamour, and Irish Billingsgate.
It is half-past two in the morning before Talbot finds himself turning the key in his Bury Street door. The whole household has apparently gone to bed; but in his sitting-room the fire has been made up. A touch of the poker upon the coals makes them leap into a blaze, and he sits down in an arm-chair to finish his cigar, and cast an eye over the notes and telegrams that have come for him during his absence. Of the former there are several; of the latter only one. He looks at the addresses of the letters first, to see whether any one of them may be in Lady Betty's handwriting; but such not being the case, he lays them down, and tears open the telegram. He does it without any special excitement. In all our lives telegrams are daily, in his they are half-hourly, occurrences. But not such telegrams as this one. He has been too lazy to light his candles; and now reads it by the firelight that frolics redly over the thin pink paper and the clerkly writing:
| 'From | | | 'To |
| Lady Betty Harborough, | | | John Talbot, |
| Harborough Castle, | | | Bury Street, |
| ----shire. | | | St. James's, |
| | | London, W. |
'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.'
When the contents of a missive that we receive, or of a speech addressed to us, diverge very widely from anything that we have been at all expecting, it is some time before the meaning of the words, however simple, succeeds in reaching our brain. Such is Talbot's case. He reads the telegram three times before he fully grasps its signification; and it is quite two minutes before it occurs to him to look at its date. 'Sent out at 11.10 A.M. Received at 11.35.' It has been lying waiting for him for fourteen hours and more. He reads it a fourth time. 'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.' What does it—what can it mean? To obey it now, in the sense in which it meant to be obeyed, is as impossible as to 'call back yesterday out of the treasures of God.' It is true that he can set off, without a moment's delay, on the receipt of it. But as that receipt has been delayed fourteen hours longer than its sender calculated upon, his obedience will be a virtual disobedience. Why has she sent for him? In any case she would have seen him in five days. What can she have to say to him of such surpassing urgency as cannot brook that short delay? His eye rests doubtfully on the vague yet pressing words. In the mouth and from the hand of any one save Betty, they would certainly imply some grave crisis—some imminent or already fallen catastrophe. In Betty's they may mean nothing. More than once before, during the past five years, has she telegraphed for him with the same indefinite peremptoriness; and when—always at great personal inconvenience, once gravely offending his chief, and seriously imperilling his future prospects—he has made shift to obey her summonses, he has discovered that it had been prompted merely by some foolish whim. Once the broken-haired terrier, which he had given her, had had a fit; once Mr. Harborough had spoken sharply to her before the servants; once she had felt so low that she could not get through the day without seeing him. These recollections combine together to form his resolution.
He lays down the paper. He will not go. Accident has made him disobedient; intention shall make him further so. Had she known at what an hour her message would reach him, even she could not have expected compliance with it.
So thinking, his cigar being by this time finished, he rises, and lighting his bedroom candle, turns to go to bed. Only, just as he is leaving the room, some impulse prompts him to read the telegram yet a fifth time. The words have certainly not changed since he last glanced at them; and yet they seem to him to have a more compelling look. Why can't he force them to be more explicit? He pauses; telegram in one hand and candle in the other. What can she want with him? It is just within the bounds of possibility that she may really need his presence; how or why, he is unable to hazard the faintest conjecture. But it is just within the limits of the possible that she may. Various suggestions of what shape that possible may take flit across his puzzled brain. Can it be that her husband has at length made the discovery of what for five years has been the open secret of all his acquaintance? In that case, as he, Talbot, has long known—known at first with leaping pulses, latterly with the cold sweat of an unspeakable dread, she would not have waited for him to come to her—she would have fled to him. It cannot, then, be that. Various other conjectures suggest themselves, but are dismissed as impracticable; but though they are dismissed, the fact remains that the woman to whom he once swore—once, nay, millions of times swore a love eternal, unalterable, exclusive—has sent him an imperative summons to her side; and he is preparing entirely to neglect it.