"How?" he asked.
"An over-dose of chloral. She often used to take it--and of course she would be very likely to want a sleeping-draught last night."
"Yes, yes, of course she would. Her nerves would be so much upset."
Their eyes met--Suzette"s seemed puzzled.
"What do you think?" asked Grantley in a whisper.
"I really don"t know. She would really have been quite likely to take too much. She would be impatient if it didn"t act quickly, you know."
"Yes, yes, of course she would. Have you sent for a doctor?"
"Oh, yes, directly I found her--before I came to you. But I"ve done some nursing, and--and there"s not the least----" She stopped suddenly, and was silent for several seconds. Then she said quietly and calmly: "There"s not the least chance, Mr. Imason."
Grantley knew what word she had rejected in favour of "chance," and why the word had seemed inappropriate. He acknowledged the justice of the change with a mournful gesture of his hands.
"Well, we can never know whether it was accidental or not," he said, as he turned to leave the room.
"No, we can never know that," said Suzette.
How should they know? Harriet Courtland had not known herself. As always, so to the end, her fury had been blind, and had destroyed her blindly.
She had struck at herself as recklessly as at her child; and here her blow had killed. Her rage had run its final course, and for the last time had its way. She slept.
And while she slept, her home was waking to the life of a new day.
CHAPTER XXIV
FRIENDS
The calamity at the Courtlands" struck on all their acquaintance like a nip of icy wind, sending a shudder through them, making them, as it were, huddle closer about them the protecting vesture of any hope or any happiness that they had. The outrage on the child stood out horrible in the light of the mother"s death: the death of the mother found an appalling explanation in the child"s plight. Whether the death were by a witting or an unwitting act seemed a small matter; darkness and blindness had fallen on the unhappy woman before the last hours, and somehow in the darkness she had pa.s.sed away. There was not lacking the last high touch of tragedy; the catastrophe which shocked and awed was welcome too. It was the best thing that could have happened. Any end was better than no end. To such a point of hopelessness had matters come, in such a fashion Harriet Courtland had used her life. The men and women who had known her, her kindred, her friends, and her household, all whom nature had designed to love her, while they shuddered over the manner of her going, sighed with relief that she was gone. The decree of fate had filled the page, and it was finished; but their minds still tingled from it as they turned to the clean sheet and prayed a kinder message.
Grantley Imason, so closely brought in contact with the drama, almost an eye-witness of it, was deeply moved, stirred to fresh feelings, and quickened to a new vision. The devastation Harriet had wrought, Tom"s cowardly desertion, the pitiable plight of the children, grouped themselves together and took on, as another of their company, the heightened and freshened impression of stale sentimentality, and a self-delusion trivial to vulgarity, which he had carried away from his encounter with Walter Blake. To all this there seemed one clue; through it all one thread ran. He felt this in the recesses of his mind, and his fingers groped after the guiding-line. That must be found, lest, treading blindly through the labyrinth, he and his too should fall into the pit whence there was no upward way. They had been half over the brink once: a preternatural effort--so it might properly be called--had pulled them back; but they were still on the treacherous incline.
Out of his sombre and puzzled reflections there sprang--suddenly as it seemed, and in answer to his cry for guidance--an enlightening pity--pity for his boy, lest he too should bear on his brow the scar of hatred, almost as plain to see as the visible mark which was to stamp little Sophy"s for evermore--and pity for Sibylla, because her empty heart had opened to so poor a tenant: in very hunger she had turned to Blake. He no longer rejected the hope of communion with the immature infantile mind of his son; he ceased to laugh scornfully at a love dedicated to such a man as Walter Blake. A new sympathy with his boy--even such as he had felt for Tom Courtland"s little girls--spurred him to fresh efforts to understand. Contempt for his wife"s impulsive affections gave way to compa.s.sion as his mind dwelt, not on what she had done, but on what had driven her to do it--as he threw back his thoughts from the unworthy satisfaction her heart had sought to the straits of starvation which had made any satisfaction seem so good. This was to look in the end at himself, and to the task of studying himself he was now thrust back. If he could not do that, and do it to a purpose, desolation and pitiableness such as he had witnessed and shuddered at stood designated as the unalterable future of his own home.
Then, at last, he was impatient; his slow persevering campaign was too irksome, and success delayed seemed to spell failure. The time comes when no man can work. The darkness might fall on his task still unperformed. He became afraid, and therefore impatient. He could not wait for Sibylla to come to him. He must meet her--in something more than civility, in something more than a formal concession of her demands, more than an acquiescence which had been not untouched by irony and by the wish to put her in the wrong. He must forget his claims and think of his needs. His needs came home to him now; his claims could wait. And as his needs cried out, there dawned in him a glow of antic.i.p.ation. What would it not mean if the needs could be satisfied?
He stayed in London for Harriet Courtland"s funeral, and in the evening went down to Milldean, a sharper edge given to his thoughts by the sight of Tom and the two little girls (Sophy could not come) following Harriet"s coffin to the grave. Christine Fanshaw was in the carriage which met him at the station, and was his companion on the homeward drive. The Courtland calamity had touched her deeply too, but touched her to bitterness--if, indeed, her outward bearing could be taken as a true index of her mind. She bore herself aggressively towards fate and its lessons; an increased acidity of manner condemned the follies of her friends; she dropped no tears over their punishment. Still there was very likely something else beneath; she had not heard from John since she came down to Milldean.
"How have you all been getting on?" Grantley asked, as he took the reins and settled himself beside her.
"We"ve done excellently since you went away. Of course we"ve been upset about this horrible business, but----"
"Otherwise you"ve done very well?" he smiled.
"Oh, yes, very!"
"Since I went away?"
"Yes, since you went away," Christine repeated.
"Perhaps it"s not a very good thing for me to come back?"
"We can hardly banish you from your own house."
The concession was grudging. Grantley laughed, and the tone of his laugh brought her eyes sharply round to his face.
"You seem very cheerful," she remarked with an accusing air.
"No, I"m not that exactly; but I"ve got an idea--and that brightens one up a bit, you know."
"Any change does that," Christine admitted waspishly.
"I saw John for a minute. He looked a bit worried. Does he complain?"
"He hasn"t complained to me."
"Oh, then it"s all right, I suppose. And he says the business is all right, anyhow. How"s the boy?"
"As merry and jolly as he can be."
"And Sibylla?"
"Yes, Sibylla too, as merry as possible."
"They both have been, you mean?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"While I"ve been away?"
"Yes, while you"ve been away."
Grantley laughed again. Christine looked at him in dawning wonder. She had expected nothing from this drive but a gloom deepening--or at least a constraint increasing--with every yard they came nearer to Milldean.
But there was something new. With some regret she recognised that her acidity, her harping on "Since you went away," had not been the best prelude to questioning or much of an invitation to confidence; and it had, moreover, failed in its primary purpose of annoying Grantley by its implied comment on his conduct. Her voice grew softer, and, with one of her coaxing little tricks, she edged herself closer to his side.
"Any good news among all the bad, Grantley?"
"There"s no good news yet," said he.
She caught at his last word.
"Yet? Yet, Grantley?"