"Ah, but I have you, Willie!"
Before he could answer her appeal, the voices were in the pa.s.sage. Her face grew calm, save for a slight frown on her brow. She shaped her lips into a smile to meet the incomers. She shot a rapid glance of caution and warning at him. The door was flung open, and the three children rushed in, Madge at their head. Madge, seeing Willie Ruston, stopped short, and her laughter died away. She turned and said,
"Marjory, here"s Mr. Ruston."
None could mistake her tone for one of welcome.
Marjory Valentine came forward. She looked at neither of them, but sat down near the table.
"Well, Madge," said Mrs. Dennison, "there"s good news for you, isn"t there? Your friend"s coming."
Madge, finding (as she thought) sympathy, came to her mother"s knee.
"Yes, I"m glad," she said. "Are you glad, mother?"
"Oh, I don"t mind," answered Mrs. Dennison, kissing her; but she could not help one glance at Willie Ruston. Bitterly she repented it, for she found Marjory Valentine following it with her open sorrowful eyes. She rose abruptly, and Ruston rose also, and with brief good-nights--Madge being kissed only on strong persuasion--took his leave. The children flocked away to take off their hats, and Marjory was left alone with her hostess.
The girl looked pale, weary, and sad. Mrs. Dennison was stirred to an impulse of compa.s.sion. Walking up to where she sat, she bent down as though to kiss her. Marjory looked up. There was a question--it seemed to be a question--in her face. Mrs. Dennison flushed red from neck to forehead, and then grew paler than the pallor she had pitied. The girl"s unspoken question seemed to echo hauntingly from every corner of the little room, "Are your lips--clean?"
CHAPTER XVII.
A SOUND IN THE NIGHT.
Slow in forming, swift in acting; slow in the making, swift in the working; slow to the summit, swift down the other slope; it is the way of nature, and the way of the human mind. What seemed yesterday unborn and impossible, is to-day incipient and a great way off, to-morrow complete, present, and accomplished. After long labour a thing springs forth full grown; to deny it, or refuse it, or fight against it, seems now as vain as a few hours ago it was to hope for it, or to fear, or to imagine, or conceive it. In like manner, the slow, crawling, upward journey can be followed by every eye; its turns, its twists, its checks, its zigzags may be recorded on a chart. Then is the brief pause--on the summit--and the tottering incline towards the declivity. But how describe what comes after? The dazzling rush that beats the eye, that in its fury of advance, its paroxysm of speed, is void of halts or turns, and, darting from point to point, covers and blurs the landscape till there seems nothing but the moving thing; and that again, while the watcher still tries vainly to catch its whirl, has sprung, and reached, and ceased; and, save that there it was and here it is, he would not know that its fierce stir had been.
Such a race runs pa.s.sion to its goal, when the reins hang loose. Hours may do what years have not done, and minutes sum more changes than long days could stretch to hold. The world narrows till there would seem to be nothing else existent in it--nothing of all that once held out the promise (sure as it then claimed to be) of escape, of help, or warning.
The very promise is forgotten, the craving for its fulfilment dies away.
"Let me alone," is the only cry; and the appeal makes its own answer, the entreaty its own concession.
Some thirty hours had pa.s.sed since the last recorded scene, and Marjory Valentine was still under Mrs. Dennison"s roof. It had been hard to stay, but the girl would not give up her self-imposed hopeless task.
Helpless she had proved, and hopeless she had become. The day had pa.s.sed with hardly a word spoken between her and her hostess. Mrs. Dennison had been out the greater part of the time, and, when out, she had been with Ruston. She had come in to dinner at half-past seven, and at nine had gone to her room, pleading fatigue and a headache. Marjory had sat up a little longer, with an unopened book on her knee. Then she also went to bed, and tried vainly to sleep. She had left her bed now, and, wrapped in a dressing-gown, sat in a low arm-chair near the window. It was a dark and still night; a thick fog hung over the little garden; nothing was to be heard save the gentle roll of a quiet sea, and the occasional blast of a steam whistle. Marjory"s watch had stopped, but she guessed it to be somewhere in the small hours of the morning--one o"clock, perhaps, or nearing two. There was an infinite weary time, then, before the sun would shine again, and the oppression of the misty darkness be lifted off. She hated the night--this night--it savoured not of rest to her, but of death; for she was wrought to a nervous strain, and felt her imaginings taking half-bodily shapes about her, so that she was fearful of looking to the right hand or the left. Sleep was impossible; to try to sleep like a surrender to the mysterious enemies round her. Time seemed to stand still; she counted sixty once, to mark a minute"s flight, and the counting took an eternity. The house was utterly noiseless, and she shivered at the silence. She would have given half her life, she felt, for a ray of the sun; but half a life stretched between her and the first break of morning. Sitting there, she heaped terrors round her; the superst.i.tions that hide their heads before daytime mockery reared them now in victory and made a prey of her. The struggle she had in her weakness entered on seemed less now with human frailty than against the strong and evil purpose of some devil; in face of which she was naught. How should she be? She had not, she told herself in morbid upbraiding, even a pure motive in the fight; her hatred of the sin had been less keen had she not once desired the love of him that caused it, and when she arrested Maggie Dennison"s kiss, she shamed a rival in rebuking an unfaithful wife. Then she cried rebelliously against her anguish. Why had this come on her, darkening bright youth? Why was she compa.s.sed about with trouble? And why--why--why did not the morning come?
The mist was thick and grey against the window. A fog-horn roared, and the sea, regardless, repeated its even beat; behind the feeble interruptions there sounded infinite silence. She hid her face in her hands. Then she leapt up and flung the window open wide. The damp fog-folds settled on her face, but she heard the sea more plainly, and there were sounds in the air about her. It was not so terribly quiet.
She peered eagerly through the mist, but saw nothing save vague tremulous shapes, vacant of ident.i.ty. Still the world, the actual, earthly, healthy world, was there--a refuge from imagination.
She stood looking; and, as she looked, one shape seemed to grow into a nearer likeness of something definite. It was motionless; it differed from the rest only in being darker and of rather sharper outline. It must be a tree, she thought, but remembered no tree there; the garden held only low-growing shrubs. A post? But the gate lay to the right, and this stood on her left hand, hard by the door of the house. What then?
The terror came on her again, but she stood and looked, longing to find some explanation for it--some meaning on which her mind could rest, and, rea.s.sured, drive away its terrifying fancies. For the shape was large in the mist, and she could not tell what it might mean. Was it human? On her superst.i.tious mood the thought flashed bright with sudden relief, and she cried beseechingly,
"Who is it? Who is there?"
A human voice in answer would have been heaven to her, but no answer came. With a stifled cry, she shut the window down, and stood a moment, listening--eager, yet fearful, to hear. Hark! Yes, there was a sound!
What was it? It was a footstep on the gravel--a slow, uncertain, wavering, intermittent step, as though of someone groping with hesitating feet and doubtful resolution through the mist. She must know what it was--who it was--what it meant. She started up again, laying both hands on the window-sash. But then terror conquered curiosity; gasping as if breath failed her and something still pursued, she ran across the room and flung open the door. She must find someone--Maggie or someone.
On the threshold she paused in amazement. The door of Mrs. Dennison"s room was open, and Maggie stood in the doorway, holding a candle, behind which her face gleamed pale and her eyes shone. She was m.u.f.fled in a long white wrapper, and her dark hair fell over her shoulders. The candle shook in her hand, but, on sight of Marjory, her lips smiled beneath her deep shining eyes. Marjory ran to her crying,
"Is it you, Maggie?"
"Who should it be?" asked Mrs. Dennison, still smiling, so well as her fast-beating breath allowed her. "Why aren"t you in bed?"
The girl grasped her hand, and pushed her back into the room.
"Maggie, I----Hark! there it is again! There"s something outside--there, in the garden! If you open the window----"
As she spoke, Mrs. Dennison darted quick on silent naked feet to the window, and stood by it; but she seemed rather to intercept approach to it than to think of opening it. Indeed there was no need. The slow uncertain step sounded again; there were five or six seeming footfalls, and the women stood motionless, listening to them. Then there was stillness outside, matching the hush within; till Maggie Dennison, tearing the wrapper loose from her throat, said in low tones,
"I hear nothing outside;" and she put the candle on the table by her.
"You can see nothing for the fog," she added as she gazed through the gla.s.s. Her tone was strangely full of relief.
"I opened the window," whispered Marjory, "and I saw--I thought I saw--something. And then I heard--that. You heard it, Maggie?"
The girl was standing in the middle of the room, her eyes fixed on Mrs.
Dennison, who leant against the window-sash with a strained, alert, watchful look on her face.
"I heard you open the window and call out something," she said. "That"s all I heard."
"But just now--just now as we stood here?"
Mrs. Dennison did not answer for a moment; her ear was almost against the panes, and her face was like a runner"s as he waits for the starter"s word. There was nothing but the gentle beat of the sea. Mrs.
Dennison pushed her hair back over her shoulders and sighed; her tense frame relaxed, and the fixed smile on her lips seemed, in broadening, to lose something of its rigidity.
"No, I didn"t, you silly child," she said. "You"re full of fancies, Marjory."
The curl of her lip and the shrug of her shoulders won no attention.
"It went across the garden from the door--across towards the gate," said Marjory, "towards the path down. I heard it. It came from near the door.
I heard it."
Mrs. Dennison shook her head. The girl sprang forward and again caught her by the arm.
"You heard too?" she cried. "I know you heard!" and a challenge rang in her voice.
"I didn"t hear," she repeated impatiently, "but I daresay you did.
Perhaps it was a man--a thief, or somebody lost in the fog. Would you like me to wake the footman? I can tell him to take a lantern and look if anyone"s in the garden."
Marjory took no notice of the offer.
"But if it was anyone, he"ll have gone now," continued Maggie Dennison, "your opening the window will have frightened him. You made such a noise--you woke me up."
"Were you asleep?" came in quick question.
"Yes," answered Mrs. Dennison steadily, "I was asleep. Couldn"t you sleep?"
"Sleep? No, I couldn"t sleep. I was afraid."