"Ah, confound the Gulf Stream!"
Lady Maud turned to her husband in surprise.
"What is the matter to-day, Edward? I didn"t know a valet was such a hero to his master. Why, Josephine hasn"t done a hand"s turn since she caught sight of the steamer at Oban, but I don"t complain."
He muttered something about Hooper having been with him for years and stood looking gloomily out of the window with his back turned to everybody.
Eustace Gordon gave a half-contemptuous shrug of his shoulders and a look at his cousin.
"Come out and see the ghillies, Wilson," he said. "By the way, I sent to the inn for whiskey this morning; you see, professor, nothing can be done without it in these parts, so I hope you are not a total abstainer."
The professor coughed gently. "I believe I am on principle. But having observed the fact you mention, I invariably carry a flask with me on my walking tours, merely, of course, as a means of acquiring information."
Mr. Wilson burst into sudden boisterous laughter. "A good joke that.
Come along! We all have a thirst for knowledge on us this morning."
Lady Maud, left alone with the two carven images, took up the sea-waif and carried it off to her own sanctum, where she stuck it in the place of honour on the mantelshelf. Then, walking to the window, she looked out on pale green jostling waves and purple-green swaying heather.
"I wonder when Louisa will turn up," she thought irrelevantly. "After all, she would have done better to come on with us and get it over, instead of waiting in the yacht for calmer weather. Suppose it were never to calm down?"
She threw open the window with a reckless laugh. The fresh wind raced in, bellying the curtains like sails, catching her slender figure with such force that she was fain to cling to the sash as to a mast. So standing, with that background of surging sea, and one hand keeping her hair from her eyes, she looked as if she were adrift and searching the horizon for some familiar landmark.
"Here"s luck, and wissing you may all go back as you came, without any mistakes whatever."
It was the spokesman ghillie from below, toasting the new tenant. She looked down to meet Eustace Gordon"s amused eyes raised to hers; she smiled back at him, and, closing the window, returned to the fireplace. There, under the eye of fate personified in the war paddle, the phrase "go back as you came" struck her as a curious wish, perhaps even a somewhat infelicitous one, considering the discomfort of their arrival. Whereat she laughed, as she did at most things. Not all, for Lady Maud, despite many attempts, had never been able to get the whip hand of her conscience. She had to _menager_ it by driving round anything at which she thought it likely to shy. Her marriage to Mr.
Wilson had been approached in this circuitous way until its manifest advantages completely obscured the central fact that she really loved her cousin Eustace. As yet repentance had not come to her; indeed, it came hardly to one so full of common sense and worldly wisdom as she was, but it came sometimes. Once as a child it had come suddenly in the sunlit solitary room into which she had been set apart for reflection, and she had knelt down to say navely, "Oh, G.o.d, I"m sorry now; but please don"t make me sorry again, for I don"t like it."
That, briefly, was still her att.i.tude towards the ideal. She did not love her husband, but she thought him sufficiently gentlemanlike and pleasing to save herself regret. She did, or rather she had, loved Eustace, but the idea of either of them permitting that past folly to interfere with the present they had deliberately chosen was absurd. To begin with, they would see little of each other, and when they did they would carefully avoid the renewal of any confidential relations; that was the great safety in these cases; for Lady Maud viewed the matter dispa.s.sionately, as a case.
She came down to dinner that evening in a pale plush teagown, with long sleeves falling back from her bare arms, and smiled at everything. At the fact that she got on perfectly without Josephine"s help; at the furtive way in which Kirsty set down the dinner, as if it were a bomb, and she in a hurry to escape the explosion; at her husband"s continued anxiety about the weather; at the professor"s profuse apologies for having intruded on them so inopportunely.
"Not at all," she said gaily; "you will make a fourth at whist; Edward loves a rubber."
"I can"t play to-night," replied her husband. "I"ve a headache."
"You do look a little flushed; perhaps it is the wind."
"The wind!" he echoed petulantly; "of course it"s the wind. Did you ever hear anything like it, Endorwick? I swear I never slept a wink last night, what with it and that confounded sea. It is enough to drive a fellow distracted."
"You are as bad as Josephine," laughed his wife. "She has been in hysterics all day until Miss Macdonald"s cook gave her a whole tumbler of hot whiskey and water. Since then she has been asleep."
"We have all been trying that remedy," put in Eustace. "What with the men coming in, and the boats being engaged, we shall want more whiskey to-morrow, Wilson."
"No, we shan"t," retorted his host quickly; "I mean it"s beastly stuff, you know. I never take anything but claret myself."
"Awfully difficult to get decent claret nowadays," remarked Eustace with the ease, to him so delightfully new, of the rich man who quarrels with the supply and not the price. So the topic pa.s.sed.
"I"ll have a cigar and go to bed; I didn"t sleep a bit last night,"
said Mr. Wilson shortly after they returned to the bare drawing-room, guiltless of all decoration, where Lady Maud"s Parisian teagown looked so oddly out of place.
"Take some hot whiskey and water," laughed his wife. "Won"t you all go to the smoking-room? You must be tired, professor, after your long walk."
But the learned man"s social beliefs forbade cigars when a charming woman was the alternative, so he elected to remain. Being in reality much fatigued, however, he shortly afterwards gave way to the seductions of semi-darkness and an arm-chair. Semi-darkness because Kirsty"s lamp smoking horribly, they preferred the light of the blazing peat fire. Outside the wind crooned round the house,--a lullaby to ears acquainted with its other notes, but to those accustomed to the stillness of the south, a banshee wail of coming trouble. With the firelight playing on the jet agraffes which held the cunning draperies on her gleaming bust and arms, Lady Maud was a picture few men could look on absolutely unmoved; but if Eustace Gordon felt the charm of her beauty, he gave no sign of it as yet.
They sate there in the semi-darkness side by side, sometimes silent, sometimes talking indifferently of indifferent subjects. Alone, as utterly alone in the world as if they two were the only man and woman in it; for the barrier which luxury raises between one human being and another had given way. Supposing, for instance, the butler, instead of bobbing up and down on the Minch in the _Clansman_, had been at his post, would they have been sitting in semi-darkness uninterrupted by inroads for coffee cups, peats, and candles? Again, would any really high-cla.s.s butler have permitted Professor Endorwick to snooze undisturbed in his chair, for two hours on end? Not that he did any harm by his slumbers; he might have awakened at any moment and joined unhesitatingly in the desultory talk of those two. True enough; yet when, at last, Eustace did rouse the learned man by lighting Lady Maud"s candle, they both felt that the tete-a-tete had not left them quite as it found them; that in some of those half-indifferent ordinary remarks a virtue had gone out of them.
She took the light from him, decidedly, with a refusal of his offer to pilot her along the dark pa.s.sages; angry with herself for the very thought, she still felt that it would be wiser to say good-night here under the professor"s eye; and as she went up the dim staircase, she paused to give a glance at the sea with a wonder as to when Louisa would find calm or courage enough to attempt the voyage. In a vague way, she recognized that things would go more comfortably if she were there. But beyond a sense of motion in the deep grey plane stretching away to a paler grey horizon, she could see nothing. The tide was flowing one way or another; that much was certain.
She opened the door of her dressing-room softly, so as not to disturb her husband should he have fallen asleep. A great fire burnt bravely in her little sitting-room beyond, and something in the unusual silence of it all enhanced its comfort in her eyes. If Josephine had been awaiting her as usual, she could not have put off the task of undressing in favour of sheer idleness by the fire. Her husband was right; something in that rhythmical surge of the sea made one not exactly restless, but on the alert; disinclined for action, yet prepared for it. A foolish idea, since what could be going to happen to the small household already, for the most part, asleep? The professor would have taken the first opportunity of recommencing that snooze legitimately in his bed, and even Eustace,--why would her thoughts run on Eustace? Irritated at her own self-consciousness, she took up a book impatiently. It interested her, and, by and by, she turned for the second volume, to find that it must have been left in the travelling bag which Kirsty"s ignorance had put in the bedroom.
Shading the light carefully, she pa.s.sed through the dressing-room, and so into the room beyond, giving a tentative glance at the bed as she entered, lest she should disturb the sleeper. It was empty. Her hand fell from the light; she looked round the room in surprise, and the next moment was on her knees beside a figure on the floor,--a figure which even in her first alarm brought back a horrible memory.
"Edward! what is the matter? Are you ill?"
Once, as a slip of a girl out blackberrying, she had come upon a tipsy tramp in a ditch; a beast of a man who had met her innocent benevolence by stumbling to his feet, pursuing her as far as his feet would carry him. This was her solitary personal experience of drunkenness, and something in her husband"s look and att.i.tude revived the dread which had remained with her ever since. Yet he might be ill--very, very ill--
"Edward! what is it?"
This time he raised an unsteady arm against the candle she held to his face, and she shrank back, shaking all over. Her first impulse was that of civilization,--to ring for help, at least for company. But what good would that do in an empty house? Josephine, until other women came to share her fears, had elected to sleep in a great chamber on the upper storey. Besides, what good would she be? Kirsty slept outside with the other farm servants. Eustace! no, no! not Eustace,--not now at any rate,--not till she was certain. There was the cook, of course; people in that rank of life were accustomed--oh, no! no! it was not possible. What a wretch she was to harbour such suspicions, when he might be ill--perhaps dying. With this protest in her mind, her rich draperies caught over her arm, the candle flaring, guttering, almost out in the swift search, she made her way to the unknown regions beyond the swing door, which separated work from leisure. Here? No! that must be the pantry. There? No! that was the gun-room. So, peering in at each room, she went along the stone pa.s.sages till suddenly a door right in front of her opened, and Eustace Gordon came out, with a candle in his hand. He had been sitting up over the smoking-room fire, impelled, as she had been, to wakefulness by something, he knew not what.
"Maud! Maud, my darling! What is it? What is the matter?"
She forgot everything in the comfort of companionship as, still shaking with fear, she went swiftly to his side.
"Edward. I think he is ill. Oh, Eustace, I am so frightened!"
And he in his turn, taken utterly by surprise, seemed to forget everything save that the woman he loved pa.s.sionately was there beside him. His thoughts had been so full of her, nothing but her, and now--
"Oh, come! please come; he is ill. I know he is ill."
"Yes! I am coming," he said with an effort at self-control. "Where is he--in your room?"
Then, with his arm round her, they went back through the silent house together. Those two alone. Yet not, it seemed to her, so much alone as when they stood at last with that drunken figure lying on the floor between them. She knew the truth at once in his quick exclamation, and then everything under sun and stars seemed to slip away and leave them face to face. "Eustace and she." "Eustace and me." The low rush of the waves caught the refrain and repeated it ceaselessly.
"Don"t be alarmed; you had better go away."
She heard the words as in a dream, scarcely recognizing the voice in its harsh pa.s.sion. "Stay, he shall not remain here; not here in your room." Then she felt his hands grip hers, and the voice rang with fierce resentment.
"Maud! Maud! that this should have come to you--to you of all people.
By heaven, it is too much. I will not bear it."
She laughed suddenly and broke from him. "You mean that he has taken too much whiskey. Well! plenty of men do that, and you others think--think none--none the worse." Then she broke down, flinging her arms across the bed by which she had been standing. "Oh, my G.o.d! what shall I do? what shall I do?"
Her outburst calmed him.
"Go into the other room, dear; I will call some one."
She turned on him as she knelt like a wild animal at bay.
"No! not the servants! no one shall know. I will not have it. Let me help. I am quite strong."