Outside, the sky was dark with a strange red, as of furnaces under the horizon, glimmering in the west. She could just distinguish the jutting corner of the more antique part of the house, built as it was in different centuries, bit by bit. That side was strangely ornamented with mediæval figures—the images of ancient warriors, all battered and weather-stained. And the land they had won was quiet, lying half asleep; only the trees still restless as night came on.
She turned her face. In front of her gleamed the shallow stair, running straight into the hall below, and all the way down hung pictures, men and women who had lived in this house, and trod the stairs, hurrying, lagging, or perhaps clinging, as she had in her weakness clung to the balustrade. Some were ill-painted, some stared wickedly; but all of them were watching. There was history in their eyes.
The girl felt a queer fellowship with the still procession; she, whose only title among them was make-believe. Perhaps, in forgotten times, her own people had fought and loved and ridden side by side with these, and their descendant had come back to a friend's house. How good it would be to let the world go on, to walk in a dream always, and not struggle any more.
She thought, with a remote disdain, of the scene downstairs. Her heart was still beating quickly; but that gripping sense of the theatre had left her. And she knew she had conquered. Barnaby's memory was safe from the woman his mother hated. One could imagine her claim collapsing, one could hear her voluble excuse, pleading bewilderment, accepting the situation—with perhaps a plaintive expression of her relief in knowing she was, after all, not as guilty as gossip said—had Lady Henrietta heard the dreadful rumours? And Barnaby's mother would smile at the thrust with victory in her soul, while the man, his cousin, would look on, smothering his chuckle, with his head on one side like a magpie, and a splash of mud that had dried on his cheek.
It was his step she heard first as they came out into the hall. He and Julia were leaving together, she talking fast. Her voice, charged with subdued excitement, rose and fell on a singing note. What she was saying did not reach up the stairs; only its contralto music. The sound of it awakened Susan in her mood of overwrought exaltation. Reality came back to her with a shock. She remembered another voice as warm, as emotional, with the same theatrical tune of tears; and she remembered the dangerous charity that had mocked her opposition. Stripped of its fantastic mist of adventure, she looked at her own story, and was ashamed. Her very scorn of the woman against whom she had been pitted turned on herself and scorched her, ranking her as low. She and Julia—no, she could not bear to be judged with Julia. The romantic sophistry that had comforted her was gone, and nothing could stay her desperate longing to be honest.
They passed underneath. Rackham was helping Julia into her furs, was hunting for her muff, with his face to the stair. The girl above held her breath. His nearness affected her with a kind of panic.
She had an intuition that he was the kind of man who would—guess. She thought of his quick movement to her side, his presumptuous readiness to stand by her, unspoken but unmistakable, with an unexplained alarm. Would they never go? Why did he loiter, looking upwards with that inexplicable smile?
As the great door shut, at last, on a silence, she sprang up and went downstairs. It was a pity she was not stronger. One should not go to be judged with a tottering step. And she would want all her courage. Knowing the spirit in which Barnaby's mother had dealt with Julia, she did not look for mercy.
But Lady Henrietta was not sitting upright and watchful, with that look of ruthlessness stamped on her thin, hard, pretty face. She had thrown herself across the sofa, her fast-knitting fingers idle, the half-finished stocking that would never be worn fallen from her hand to the floor. She lay like a broken reed; deprived of the motive that had sustained her—and she was crying.
That sight stirred all the heart in Susan. She ran to her blindly, only conscious of a great compassion that shamed her selfish terror of the weight of a lie. She could not tell her ... now.