What if her family had discovered her absence?
The question was a fever to her blood. At the time she had set off from Keswick the chance of that discovery had appeared to her the least of the dangers that she ran, so completely had she been engrossed by the necessity of regaining her letters; and, besides, she had laid her plans carefully, with perfect confidence in the fidelity of the groom. Afterwards, at Wastdale, the hurry of events had obscured her to all speculation on the matter, compelling a concentration of her faculties upon immediate issues. Now, however, she began to see a hundred threatening possibilities.
She had pleaded a headache. What more likely than that her father or her aunt should have come to her room to inquire after her before they went to bed? Her father?--she dismissed him with a moment"s reflection. The good man took life and his daughter"s ailments easily.
But her aunt! Kate remembered with a shiver that she was a h.o.m.oeopathist. She was bound to have inquired. She could not enter the room, it is true, for Kate had locked the door and held the key safe in her pocket.
She felt in her dress suddenly, half-expecting to find that she had dropped it. It was safe, however, and she experienced a relief; but the relief was only momentary.
For the window of her bedroom opened level on to the garden. A lucky advantage, she had considered it before, as affording an easy egress and return. Now it seemed to her the most vulnerable point in her plan. For if her aunt made inquiries at the door, and received no answer, she had but to step into the garden to solve her perplexities.
A pa.s.sing vision of an old lady in bedroom slippers padding over the gra.s.s with a box of pills failed to distract her. Kate sent her wits abroad on the wings of fear in search of excuses, but they returned to her empty-handed. Her dread was, moreover, accentuated by a retrospect upon the other dangers of that night. Her successful evasion of them only made this last risk loom the larger.
The nearer she drew towards home, the more it overshadowed her. When she crossed the marsh land at the end of the Lake, discovery had already become the probability; by the time she pa.s.sed Lodore, a certainty, and when she topped Castle Hill, just above Keswick town, she strained her eyes towards the water"s edge, fully expecting to see every window of their house ablaze with light.
All was in darkness, however, except for one faint glimmer, which Kate guessed came from the stables. The revulsion of feeling which she underwent acted on her like a shock, and she reined up her horse and clung to the saddle, dizzy. In the hollow a clock chimed the half-hour, lifting a silvery encouragement, and she moved on again slowly down the hill. Some twenty yards from the front of the house she dismounted, led the horse into a lane which gave on to the road, crossed a paddock at the back of the garden, and reached the stables, which stood apart from the main building. The light which she had noticed came from the harness-room; she tapped softly on the window-pane and was answered by a low growl, followed by a sharp "Quiet!"
Immediately afterwards the door was opened cautiously, and the groom Martin appeared and led the horse in quietly. Kate followed him and closed the door.
"What time is it?" she asked, in a whisper.
"Just gone half-past five, Miss."
"Has any one--I mean, no one has noticed my absence?"
Martin rea.s.sured her, with a touch of patronage in his tone, which a c.o.c.kney deficiency of aspirates made singularly unpalatable. She turned to the collie; he had followed Martin from the harness-room and was wisely superintending the proceedings with his ear c.o.c.ked and his head on one side.
"You brought Charlie in."
"Yes, Miss! I dursn"t leave him in the yard. He mightn"t have known your footsteps at once."
"That was thoughtful of you." The dog took the compliment to itself after the fashion of its kind, and showed his appreciation by planting his forepaws as high up on her as he could, and stretching itself lazily.
"Thank you very much," said Kate. "Good night!" and she hurried across the yard, pursued by a whispered--
"You "re very welcome, Miss, I"m sure."
A wicket-gate gave her entrance into the garden, and she crept softly to the window of her bedroom, and opened it with a palpitating heart.
Nothing, however, had been disarranged, the room was as she had left it. She did not dare to risk a light, but flung off her clothes quickly in the dark, unlocked the door, and tumbled into bed. For a long time sleep would not come to her in spite of her fatigue. She heard the clock strike six, and then half-past. For now that she herself was safe, her thoughts unconsciously reverted to Gordon. She saw his face again framed in the darkness, as the light fell on it from her lanthorn, and wondered whether he was still on the bridge, looking eastwards down the Pa.s.s. That last cry of his recurred to her.
"Kitty!" The name rang in her ears, stretched out into a threnody. She tried to flee from it, and it pursued her, now swelling into the deep peal of an organ-note, now sinking into a pitiful wail. And it was not merely the cry she heard, but Gordon"s voice in it, vibrating with its hopeless misery. For a time it accused her sharply, but with continual repet.i.tion began to lose its meaning. The girl started to murmur the word to herself mechanically, in an undertone of accompaniment.
Finally it became a lullabye, and so hymned her to sleep.
"Kitty!"
Was she destined to hear it all her life, Kate questioned on the borderland of sleep.
"Kitty!"
A hand was laid on her shoulder and she woke with a start. A girl-cousin, one of the intending bridesmaids, was standing by her bedside.
"How startled you look!"
"I thought you were----" Kate checked herself in confusion, and a peal of laughter rippled through the room. It warned her of the part she had to play.
"What time is it?" she asked hastily.
"Ten o"clock! Your aunt would not have you called before. How is your head?"
Kate a.s.serted complete recovery and proceeded to dress, though with a languid dilatoriness which belied her statement. The house was nearly full of her women-folk relations, and she dreaded to face them. She looked at herself in the mirror and fancied every one would read her night"s ride in her jaded pallor and the shadows about her eyes. Even her father noticed them when she entered the breakfast-room, with a "You don"t look over bright, Kitty!" The company was a.s.sembled in full force about the table, and she had to run the gauntlet of their smirking condolements. "Never mind. I will put you right. It"s bile."
h.o.m.oeopathy smiled comfortably from behind the tea-urn, and Kate for the first time thanked Providence for the birth of Dr. Hahnemann. She noticed with relief that the meal was nearly over, but gained no respite thereby. For, after breakfast, there were new presents to be inspected and acclaimed--noticeably one from Poonah, a jade idol of most admired ugliness. Kate explained her shiver of repulsion by the carven malice of its features. Then followed consultations upon frocks, interspersed with eulogies of David and predictions of the happiness in store for well-a.s.sorted couples, plainly calling for enthusiastic answers nicely tempered by a diffident modesty. At times, indeed, the task almost exceeded her powers of endurance, and she felt madly spurred to hurl the truth like a bombsh.e.l.l into the midst of the flummery. She restrained herself, however, drawing a faint solace of amus.e.m.e.nt from a mental picture of the resultant chaos, and somehow or another the day wore on to its close. "They will know in the morning,"
she reflected. But she was mistaken. It was not until the third day that the news of the liberation came.
Gordon quickened his pace as he reached the basin of the valley under an apprehension lest he should find the farm people already risen.
For, although it was still quite dark, there was all around him that universal movement, as if the earth itself were stirring from its sleep, which tells of an approaching dawn. The last two fields he covered at a run and regained the farm only to discover that his fears were groundless. The lamp in his parlour was still alight, but beginning to flicker for want of replenishing. Gordon cautiously opened the door at the foot of the staircase and listened. But he could hear nothing but his own breathing; evidently no one was moving as yet. He returned into the room to blow out the lamp, but was checked by the sight of his writing case on a cabinet against the wall. He went to it, drew out a packet of letters, and, pulling up a chair to the table, read, by the last spurts of the light, those which Kate had sent to him from Poonah. How blind he must have been, he thought. Why, effort was visible in every line of them, coldness seeking to screen itself beneath a wealth of phrases. He commenced to speculate curiously which portions were Hawke"s dictation and which her own work; otherwise the letters awakened no feeling in him.
Phrases here and there fixed his attention. "You came into my life like a ray of sunlight into a musty room." Yes! Hawke would have invented that, knowing how it would appeal to him. And, again, "I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes"--a postscript, scribbled hastily and smudged, evidently Kate"s own, and written covertly in Hawke"s presence. The extinction of the lamp put an end to this unprofitable investigation, and Gordon gathered the letters together, placed them in the grate, and set them ablaze. He waited until the last spark had died out and a heap of black flaky ashes was all that was left of the false tokens which he had treasured as sacred, and then crept cautiously up to his room. For some time he remained by his window, thinking. He noticed the angle in the barn-wall from which Hawke had darted out, and it seemed to him that the century might well have run to its end since then. His mind wandered to a side-issue, jumping at a stray suggestion that Time was held to mark age only because it represented the conventional progress of self-knowledge.
But what if the knowledge of twenty years were crowded into one night?
Gordon felt that that had been the case with him. He understood so much now; for instance, the fancy which had fleetingly occurred to him that they both had been brought into the isolation of that valley to work out a predestined purpose. He understood that purpose, could explain it, and would demonstrate his explanation to the other"s ignorance tomorrow. A gradual fading of colour from the sky made him correct himself. "To-day," he murmured, with something of quiet exultation in his voice. Only he must spare Kate; no suspicion must be allowed to connect her with the solution of his problem. "I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes," she had written. Well, he must prove to her that she was right--some way or another. The sound of movement in the interior of the house brought him back to the present and hinted the advantage of rest. So Gordon went to bed and slept dreamlessly until the sun stood high above the shoulder of Great End.
CHAPTER VIII
As Gordon was breakfasting next morning, the door was thrown open and Hawke strolled in from the lane.
"Well, have you got over your fatigue yet?" he asked, with a show of cordiality.
"Quite, thanks!"
Gordon let a moment or two slip before he found his tongue. For his new knowledge, acting vividly upon a somewhat morbid imagination, had not merely changed his conceptions of Hawke"s character, but, with them, also his very impressions of his appearance. He had been unconsciously developing the man"s features and body to express the qualities which he now attributed to him, moulding them, as it were, by the model of his own thoughts. So that, at the first, when Hawke stood before him in the flesh, clearly lit by the sunlight, which was pouring in through the open doorway, he hardly recognised his enemy.
The very colloquialism of his speech seemed incongruous and out of place.
"You slept soundly?" asked Hawke.
There was a shade of anxiety in the question appreciable by his observer, and a faint symptom of a sneer about the lips when the answer was received.
"Like a humming-top."
"You are going over to Eskdale, aren"t you?" Gordon resumed.
"I shall if I have time."
"You have changed your plans?" The query was put with a sudden alacrity.
"More or less. Lawson arrived at the Inn this morning from Drigg."