I think we had forgotten Miss Summersley Satchel altogether. But she appeared as we sat down to tea at that same table at which we had breakfasted, and joined us as a matter of course. Conceivably she found the two animated friends of the morning had become rather taciturn.
Indeed there came a lapse of silence so portentous that I roused myself to effort and told her, all over again, as I realized afterwards, the difficulties that had benighted me upon t.i.tlis. Then Miss Satchel regaled Mary with some particulars of the various comings and goings of the hotel. I became anxious to end this tension and went into the inn to pay my bill and get my knapsack. When I came out Mary stood up.
"I"ll come just a little way with you, Stephen," she said, and I could have fancied the gla.s.ses of the companion flashed to hear the surname of the morning reappear a Christian name in the afternoon....
"Is that woman behind us safe?" I asked, breaking the silence as we went up the mountain-side.
Mary looked over her shoulder for a contemplative second.
"She"s always been--discretion itself."
We thought no more of Miss Satchel.
"This parting," said Mary, "is the worst of the price we have to pay.... Now it comes to the end there seem a thousand things one hasn"t said...."
And presently she came back to that. "We shan"t remember this so much perhaps. It was there we met, over there in the sunlight--among those rocks. I suppose--perhaps--we managed to say something...."
As the ascent grew steeper it became clear that if I was to reach the Melch See Inn by nightfall, our moment for parting had come. And with a "Well," and a white-lipped smile and a glance at the Argus-eyed hotel, she held out her hand to me. "I shall live on this, brother Stephen,"
she said, "for years."
"I too," I answered....
It was wonderful to stand and face her there, and see her real and living with the warm sunlight on her, and her face one glowing tenderness. We clasped hands; all the warm life of our hands met and clung and parted.
I went on alone up the winding path,--it zigzags up the mountain-side in full sight of the hotel for the better part of an hour--climbing steadily higher and looking back and looking back until she was just a little strip of white--that halted and seemed to wave to me. I waved back and found myself weeping. "You fool!" I said to myself, "Go on"; and it was by an effort that I kept on my way instead of running back to her again. Presently the curvature of the slope came up between us and hid her altogether, hid the hotel, hid the lakes and the cliffs....
It seemed to me that I could not possibly see her any more. It was as if I knew that sun had set for ever.
-- 7
I lay at the Melch See Inn that night, and rose betimes and started down that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. I walked to Sachseln, caught an early train to Lucerne and went on in the afternoon to Como.
And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. It seemed to me that at any moment I could go to her. And the last vestige of any cloud between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.
In the afternoon I wrote to Rachel. I had not written to her for three days, and even now I told her nothing of my meeting with Mary. I had not written partly because I could not decide whether I should tell her of that or not; in the end I tried to hide it from her. It seemed a little thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.
Three days later I reached Milan, a day before the formal opening of the Peace Congress. But I found a telegram had come that morning to the Poste Restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my mind. It came from Paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:
_"Come back at once to London. Justin has been told of our meeting and is resolved upon divorce. Will do all in my power to explain and avert but feel you should know at once."_
There are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear that for a time it is impossible to believe them. I remember now that as I read that amazing communication through--at the first reading it was a little difficult to understand because the Italian operator had guessed at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me.
That followed sluggishly. I felt as one might feel when one opens some offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.
"What _nonsense_!" I said, faint-heartedly. I stood for a time at my bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. But it stayed, and became more and more real. Suddenly with a start I perceived it was real. I had to do things forthwith.
I rang the bell and asked for an _Orario_. "I shan"t want these rooms. I have to go back to England," I said. "Yes,--I have had bad news." ...
-- 8
"We"ve only got to explain," I told myself a hundred times during that long sleepless journey. The thundering wheels so close beneath my head echoed: "Explain. Oh yes! Explain! Explain! Explain!"
And something, a voice to which I would not listen, urged: "Suppose they do not choose to believe what you explain."
When I sat face to face with Maxwell Hartington, my solicitor, in his ink-splashed, dirty, yellow-grained room with its rows of black tin boxes, I could no longer ignore that possibility. Maxwell Hartington sat back in his chair after his fashion, listening to my story, breathing noisily through his open mouth, perspiring little beads and looking more out of condition than ever. I never knew a man so wine-sodden and so sharp-witted.
"That"s all very well, Stratton," he said, "between ourselves. Very unfortunate and all that sort of thing. But it doesn"t satisfy Justin evidently; and we"ve got to put a different look on it if we can, before we go before a jury: You see----" He seemed to be considering and rejecting unpalatable phrases "They won"t understand."
"But," I said, "after all--, a mere chance of the same hotel. There must be more evidence than that."
"You spent the night in adjacent rooms," he said dryly.
"Adjacent rooms!" I cried.
He regarded me for a moment with something bordering on admiration.
"Didn"t you know?" he said.
"No."
"They"ve routed that out. You were sleeping with your two heads within a yard of one another anyhow. Thirty-six you had, and she had thirty-seven."
"But," I said and stopped.
Maxwell Hartington"s admiration gave place I think to a slight resentment at my sustained innocence. "And Lady Mary changed rooms with her secretary two nights before--to be near the vacant room. The secretary went into number 12 on the floor below,--a larger room, at thirteen francs a day, and one not exposed to the early daylight...."
He turned over a paper on his desk. "You didn"t know, of course," he said. "But what I want to have"--and his voice grew wrathful--"is sure evidence that you didn"t know. No jury on earth is going to believe you didn"t know. No jury!---- Why,"--his mask dropped--"no man on earth is going to believe a yarn like that! If that"s all you have, Stratton----"
-- 9
Our London house was not shut up--two servants were there on board-wages against the possibility of such a temporary return as I was now making--Rachel was away with you three children at Cromingham. I had not told her I was returning to London, and I had put up at one of my clubs.
Until I had had a second interview with Maxwell Hartington I still would not let myself think that it was possible that Mary and I would fail with our explanations. We had the common confidence of habitually unchallenged people that our word would be accepted. I had hoped indeed to get the whole affair settled and abolished without anything of it coming to Rachel"s ears. Then at my leisure I should be able to tell her exactly how things had come about. But each day made it clearer that things were not going to be settled, that the monstrous and the incredible was going to happen and that Justin had set his mind implacably upon a divorce. My sense of complete innocence had already been shaken by Maxwell Hartington; I had come to perceive that we had been amazingly indiscreet, I was beginning to think we had been criminally indiscreet.
I saw Maxwell Hartington for a second time, and it became clear to me I must abandon any hope of keeping things further from Rachel. I took my luggage round to my house, to the great astonishment of the two servants,--they had supposed of course that I was in Italy--and then went down on the heels of a telegram to Rachel. I forget the wording of that telegram, but it was as little alarming as possible; I think I said something about "back in London for doc.u.ments; shall try to get down to you." I did not specify any particular train or indeed state definitely that I was coming that day.
I had never been to Cromingham before. I went to the house you occupied on the Esplanade and learnt that you were all upon the beach. I walked along the sea-wall scrutinizing the various bright groups of children and nursemaids and holiday people that were scattered over the sands. It was a day of blazing sunshine, and, between the bright sky and the silver drabs of the sand stretched the low levels of a sea that had its customary green-grey touched for once with something of the sapphire glow of the Mediterranean. Here and there were gay little umbrella tents or canvas shelters, and a bather or so and pink and white wading children broke the dazzling edge of foam. And I sought you with a kind of reluctance as though finding you would bring nearer the black irrational disaster that hung over us all.
And when I found you at last you were all radiantly happy and healthy, the prettiest of families, and only your mother was touched with any gravity deeper than the joy of sunshine and sea. You and Mademoiselle Potin--in those days her ministrations were just beginning--were busy constructing a great sea-wall that should really and truly stop the advancing tide. Rachel Two was a little apart, making with infinite contentment an endless mult.i.tude of conical sand pies with her little tin pail. Margaret, a pink inarticulate lump, scrabbled in the warm sand under Jessica"s care. Your mother sat and watched you--thoughtfully. And before any of you knew that I was there my shadow fell across you all.
You accepted my appearance when I ought to have been in Italy with the unquestioning confidence with which you still take all my comings and goings. For you, Italy, America, any place is just round the corner. I was kissed with affection but haste, and you got back to your sand-works as speedily as possible. I inspected Rachel Two"s mounds,--she was giving them the names of her various aunts and uncles--and patted the crowing Margaret, who ignored me. Rachel had sprung to her feet and kissed me and now hovered radiant over me as I caressed you youngsters.
It was all so warm, so real, that for an instant the dark threat that hung over us all vanished from my skies, to return with the force of a blow.
"And what has brought you back?" said Rachel. "I had expected a month of widowhood. What can have brought you back?"
The dancing gladness in her eyes vanished swiftly as she waited for an answer to her question. She caught the note of tragedy from my face.
"Why have you come back from Italy?" she asked in an altered voice.