EVELYN left the little sitting-room and went downstairs with a quickly beating heart. She did not quite see the meaning of what she was bidden to do. It was like the formula of a doctor’s prescription, obscure yet authoritative, and to be obeyed without doubt or delay. Her heart was beating high, and her brain throbbing in sympathy. She had no thought but to get as quickly as possible to the nearest telegraph office; the only thing that restrained her was the thought that she was not quite sure where her husband was. It had been settled that he should return home that day, on which she had determined to return too so as to meet him. That part of her intention she evidently could not carry out, but in her absorption she did not reflect that, if he had arrived, it would be to the disappointment and surprise of finding her gone, without any explanation; that he would probably be annoyed and displeased, and not in a mood to receive her laconic and unexplained question graciously. This did not enter into Evelyn’s mind at all. She was given up to one thought. That Rowland should be harsh to her or misunderstand her did not occur to her as possible.
She hurried downstairs to fulfil her mission, bidding Eddy remain and take his breakfast. “You look as if you wanted it, my poor boy,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.
“Oh, I want it—and something stronger!” he said, with a laugh.
“No, my dear; oh, no, my dear,” she said anxiously. She even came back from the door, hurried and eager as she was, to deliver, like a true woman, a few very broken words on this subject. “Be content with the tea, dear Eddy,” she said. A great tenderness for the boy had risen in her breast. He had never known his mother; how much there was to be excused in him! And he might have been her own son! though she thanked God that it was not so, and reflected with horror what her life would have been, had her youthful hopes been fulfilled, with such a man as Edward Saumarez had turned out to be, and with such a son: yet the very thought that she might have been the boy’s mother always softened Evelyn. He was such a boy, too, still! though he had run the course of so many unknown ills—young enough to be taken into his mother’s arms, if he had one, and coaxed and persuaded back to innocence. Eddy had no such feeling in the roused and excited state of his mind; he would not laugh as she left him so as she could hear, but waited till, as he thought, she had left the house before he allowed that unsteady peal to burst forth. “Be content with the tea! Oh, the natural preacher, the all-advising woman!” but with the sound of that “dear Eddy!” in his ears the young man laughed till he cried—only because it was so good a joke, he said to himself: but in this there was a certain self-deception too.
Evelyn was hurrying out, waiting for no one to open the door for her, when she was suddenly stopped by Rogers, the servant who, she now recollected suddenly, was the personal attendant of Saumarez himself. She had not attempted to account for his presence, nor indeed thought of him in the hurry of her thoughts. But it now flashed upon her, with sudden surprise and vexation, in the enlightenment of his words—“My master, ma’am,” he said, “would like to see you before you go.”
“Your master!” It was with a gasp of alarm that Evelyn replied. “I did not know,” she said, “that Mr. Saumarez was here.”
“We came home—sudden,” said the man, “yesterday. My master will often take a fancy like that. And he hopes, ma’am, that you will not go out of the house without giving him the pleasure of seeing you.”
“I am in great haste,” Mrs. Rowland said. “I came to Mr. Edward entirely on business. I am very sorry Mr. Saumarez was told that I was here: for indeed I have no time——”
“Mr. Saumarez bade me say, ma’am, that as you knew he was unable to come to you, he hoped as you would overlook the liberty and come to him.” Rogers stood respectfully but firmly between Evelyn and the door. Not, of course, to prevent her going, which was an impossibility, but with a moral impulse that she felt incapable of resisting. “He has been in a deal of suffering, and it will cheer him up, ma’am,” the man said.
With a pang of disappointment she yielded to the delay. It could only be for a few minutes, after all. She was exceedingly unwilling not only to be delayed, but to encounter Eddy’s father under any circumstances, and above all in his own house. She followed the attendant with great suppressed impatience and reluctance. The sitting-room occupied by Saumarez was close to the door, with a window upon the street. It was the dining-room of the little London house, the back part, which was separated from the front by folding-doors, half-covered with curtains, being Saumarez’s bedroom. He was seated in his invalid chair between the fire and the window, and though the foggy morning had very little light in it, a blind of much the same colour as the fog, yellowish and grimy, was drawn down half over the window. Out of this obscurity, upon which the red light of the fire shed at one side an illumination which looked smoky in the atmosphere of the fog, the long thin countenance, peaked beard, and gleaming eyes of the invalid were visible with the most striking Rembrandt effect. He held out to Evelyn a very thin, very white hand.
“Thanks, dear lady,” he said, “for this gracious visit. I scarcely hoped for anything so good. In London, at this time of the year, a fair visitor of any kind is a rarity; but you!—I believed you to be dispensing hospitality in marble halls,” he added, with a little laugh of the veiled satire which implied to Evelyn all that scorn of her late marriage, and parvenu husband, and vulgar wealth, which he did not put into words.
“You wonder, perhaps, what I have done with Rosamond,” she said; “but she is perfectly well and perfectly safe. My own absence from home is one of three days only. I return to-night.”
“Ah, Rosamond,” he said; “poor child! To tell the truth I did not think of Rosamond. She is quite safe, I have no doubt. But you? What is my friend Rowland about that he allows his beautiful wife to come up to London, even in the dead season, on business, by herself?”
“The business,” she said, hurriedly, “was my own, and he could not have done it for me. I hope you are better, and that the waters——”
“The waters,” he said, with a smile, “are good to amuse people with an idea that something is being done for them. That is the best of medical science now-a-days. It does amuse one somehow, however vain one knows it to be, to think that something is being done. And so your business, my dear lady, concerned my son? Happy Eddy to be mixed up in the affairs of such a woman as you.”
“There was a question I had to ask him,” said Evelyn, faltering.
“Of so much importance that you have tried to find him vainly for two days. I say again, happy Eddy! I wish these were questions which his father could answer: but alas! all that is over with me.”
“The question did not personally concern either him or me,” said Evelyn, “but the well-being of a third person, for whom I am very closely concerned.”
“Happy third person!” said the invalid, with a gleam of those wolfish, eager eyes out of the partial gloom. “I would I were one of those third persons. And Rowland, my good friend, does he know all about it, and of a necessity so strong that a lovely lady had almost forced her way into Eddy’s room?”
“Mr. Saumarez,” said Evelyn, feeling her cheeks burn. “My husband knows, or will know, exactly in every particular what I have done, and will approve of it. You know what a boy of Eddy’s age, and lately a visitor in my own house, the companion of my husband’s son, must be to me.”
“Age is very deceitful,” said Saumarez with a laugh, “especially in Eddy’s case, if you will permit me to say it. He is not a boy, as you will call him, to be judged by mere numerals. Eddy is one of the sons occasionally to be met with in highly civilized life, who are older than their fathers. Even a husband’s son, dear lady, has been known to be not over-safe,” he added with again that mocking laugh.
“There is no question of safety,” said Evelyn. She felt the blaze of shame to be so addressed, enveloping her from head to foot like a fire. “You must pardon me if I say that this is a kind of conversation very unpleasing to me,” she said with spirit, “and most uncalled for.” His laugh sounded like the laugh of a devil in her ears.
“Nay,” he said, “you must not let my precious balms break your head. I speak as a friend, and in your best interests, Evelyn.”
“My name is Mrs. Rowland, Mr. Saumarez.”
“Oh! if I could ever forget the time when you were not Mrs. Rowland, but my Evelyn! But that, of course, is not to the purpose,” he added with a sigh, at which he presently laughed. “We get sentimental. Dear lady, if you will let me say it, your age is precisely the one which is most dangerous, and in which a taste for youth has been often shown, in various conspicuous examples.”
Evelyn rose to her feet with a start of offence and shame. She had not known it was in her to be so wildly, almost fiercely angry. “Not another word!” she said. “You abuse your privileges as a sick man. I will not hear another word.”
“And what,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand to detain her, “if I—or Rogers—were to let my good friend Rowland know that he had difficulty in preventing the trusted and honoured wife from making a forcible entrance into a young man’s room?”
If Evelyn had been a weak or unreasoning woman, had she been without trust in her husband or herself, had she been apt to concealment, or to believe, as so many do, that an evil motive is always the most readily believed in—it is possible that she might at this odious moment, a moment she could never bear to think of after—have been lost one way or other, bound as a miserable thrall under this man’s power, whose malignant mouth could have done her such vile and frightful injury. But fortunately she was none of these things. It had not even once occurred to her that her determination to see Eddy, wherever she might find him, would have been made the subject of any remark. And if she now perceived that it was a foolish and imprudent thing, the discovery was made in a moment of such extreme excitement that it had no effect upon her. She stood by him for a second, towering over him in a wrath which possessed and inspired her. “Do so,” she said, “at once: or rather let Rogers do so, Mr. Saumarez. It will not be so degrading to him, a man without instruction, possibly knowing no better, as it would be to you. And besides, he could speak from personal knowledge. His letter will find my husband at Rosmore. Good-bye.”
“And do you think you are to silence the world in this way?” said Saumarez. “Myself, or Rogers perhaps, and your husband if he is such a fool—but——”
“Good-bye,” she said once more.
“Evelyn!” he cried.
“Good-bye.” Mrs. Rowland went out of the house like an arrow from a bow, drawing the door behind her, with a sound that rang through the sleepy street. She came so quickly that she almost discovered a watcher on the other side, intent upon all her movements; that is, she gave him the shock of a possible discovery: for, as for Evelyn, she saw nothing. Her eyes were dim and misty with the heat of indignation that seemed to rise up from her flushed cheeks and panting breath to blind her. She walked away with the impulse of that wrath, at a pace that would have been impossible under other circumstances, walking far and fast, incapable of thinking even where it was that she wanted to go.
The pure air, however, and the rapid movement, soon brought Mrs. Rowland to herself, and she turned back upon her rapid course so suddenly that again—But she did not observe any one, or anything in the road, which, even in this dead season, was sufficiently full to confuse an unaccustomed visitor. She went at once to the telegraph office and sent off the message, as a matter of precaution, sending it to Rosmore, and in duplicate to the house of Sir John Marchbanks, where it was possible Rowland might still be. She added a word of explanation to the message dictated by Eddy. “Don’t be surprised to hear from me, from London,” she wrote, without any recollection of the concise style necessary to a telegram, “all explanations when we meet, and I know you will approve.” When she had sent this off, Evelyn was solaced and more or less restored to herself. She walked back more calmly to the hotel, beginning to feel a little the effect of the morning’s exertions and excitement. But when she reached the shelter of her room, and felt herself alone, and under no restraint from other people’s looks, she was incapable of keeping up any longer. A long fit of crying gave vent to the pent up trouble in her breast. She bent down her head upon her hands and wept like a child, helplessly. When one has been outraged, insulted, hurt in every fibre, and with no power to vindicate or avenge, which are momentary modes of relief—the mingled pain and shame and rage, quite justifiable, yet making up a passion which hurts almost as much as the cause which produced it, lay all one’s defences low. Men even are wrought to tears by such means, how much more a woman, to whom that expression of suffering is always so painfully and inconveniently near.
When Evelyn had overcome this weakness and recovered her confusion, I cannot assert that her mind was easy or her thoughts comfortable. Was she so sure that her husband would approve? Had she not been imprudent and unguarded in what she had done? The thought had not entered her mind before, but the light of a vile suggestion is one that makes the whitest innocence pause and shudder. Could any one else for a moment think——. She said to herself, No, no! with a high head and expanded nostril. But it made her unhappy in spite of herself. It was as if something filthy and festering had been thrown into her mind. She could not forget it, could not throw it forth again, felt its unutterable foulness like a burn or a wound. Rogers, perhaps the servants, might have thought—for servants have dreadful ways of thinking, dreadful back-stair ways, the ideas of minds which peep and watch, and hope to detect. He might have thought—and in that mysterious way in which such whispers fly, it might be communicated to some other privileged attendant, and so go forth upon the air, an evil breath. Was it possible! was it possible! Evelyn seemed to feel already the confusion, the bewilderment, the restless horror of a whispered scandal, an accusation that never could be met, because never openly made, one of those vile breathings which go through society. It is so strange to think that one may one’s self be subject to such an insinuated wrong. Herself! the last person, the most unlikely, the most impossible! It was already a wrong to her that the vile idea should be put within the furthest range of things thought of. And thus Mrs. Rowland spent a very restless and miserable afternoon. She could neither eat nor rest. She put up her “things,” the few necessaries she had brought with her, to be ready for the night train, and tried to still herself, to keep quiet, to read, but without effect. There is nothing so difficult to get through as a day spent in waiting, and it was scarcely past twelve o’clock, when, after all she had gone through, she returned to the solitary empty hotel room, with its big stone balustrade against the window, and the crowd sweeping along below. She went out upon the balcony and watched for the coming of the telegraph boy with an answer to her message. There were dozens of telegraph boys coming and going, and at intervals she could see one below, mounting the very steps of the hotel. But hour after hour passed, and nothing came for her. On two or three occasions she ran to the door of her room, as if that could quicken the steps of the tardy messenger; but among the many people who passed up and down the stairs and looked at her curiously, there was no one bringing the reply upon which all the success of this painful mission hung.
And then it was five o’clock: but not soon, not till months of weary waiting seemed to have passed; and then ensued, to Evelyn perhaps the worst of all, a half-hour of excitement and expectation almost beyond bearing. Would Eddy come? Would he stand by his bargain, though she was not able to do so with hers. It was nothing that he did not appear at the hour. He had never been punctual. He was one of those who do not know the value of time, nor what it is to others to keep to an hour. Nothing would ever convince Eddy that the rest of the world were not as easy in respect to time, as little bound by occupation as himself. He had no understanding of those who do a certain thing at a certain time every day of their lives. The waiter appeared bringing lights, uncalled for, for Evelyn, sitting in the partial dark, looking out upon the lamps outside, felt her heart beating too quick and fast to give her leisure to think of what was required or the hour demanded. He brought lights, he brought tea; he made an attempt, which she prevented to draw the curtains, and shut out the gleaming world outside, the lights and sounds which still seemed to link her with the distance, and made it possible that some intelligence might still come, some answer to her prayer. And then suddenly, all at once, in the hush after the waiter had gone from the room, Eddy opened the door. Mrs. Rowland sprang from her seat as if she had not expected him at all, and his coming was the greatest surprise in the world.
“Eddy! you!”
“Did you not expect me?” he said, astonished.
She drew a chair near her, and made him sit down. “I feel as if I had brought you here on false pretences. I have got no answer to the telegram.”
Eddy had taken a small pocket-book out of his breast pocket, and held it in his hand. He stopped suddenly, and looked at it, then at Mrs. Rowland. He was excited and pale, but yet his usual humorous look broke over his face. “No answer?” he said.
“Did I tell you my husband was from home? he ought to have returned to-day; but perhaps he has not done so. I ought also to have returned to-day. It means nothing but that he has not got home.”
“There is no answer,” Eddy said, as if explaining matters to himself, “and I will be giving myself away and no security acquired. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” he said. “I have got it all here, Mrs. Rowland; but you ought to give me your word that I shall not be the worse for it.”
She sat gazing at him with such uncomprehension, that he laughed aloud.
“She doesn’t understand me,” he said, “not a bit: it is not in her to understand; she has not an idea how serious it is.”
Eddy’s hands were unsteady, his little grey eyes were sparkling with a feverish fire. From his foot, which he kept shaking in nervous commotion, as he sat on the table with one leg suspended, to the mobile eyebrows, which quivered and twisted over his forehead, there was nothing still about him. He took a piece of paper on which something was written out of his pocket-book, and looked at it, holding it in his hand.
“Here it is,” he said, and his voice shook a little, though its tone was light enough. “The guilty witness. When you put this into your husband’s hands, Mrs. Rowland, he will know who forged his name. Have you a safe place to put it in, a purse or something? For, remember, I am placing my life in your hands.”
“Eddy, Eddy, you frighten me! I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“No, I know you can’t; perhaps not even when you see it will you know. But give him that, Mrs. Rowland, and he will understand.”
He held the paper a moment more, and then gave it to her. There was not a particle of colour in his sallow, small face. He sat on the corner of the table, swinging one leg, at first not looking at her, a smile on his face, which grew every moment more grey.
Evelyn took the paper almost with alarm. She gazed at it with a look at first of intense surprise and disappointment. What did it mean? her husband’s signature written two or three times on a piece of paper, as if he had been trying a pen. James—James, twice or thrice repeated; then “Rowland.” Then in full, “James Rowland,” with a characteristic flourish at the end. She looked at the paper and then at Eddy, and then——
It was his look that forced conviction on her mind, not the guilty witness in her hand. She gave a great cry, “Eddy!” and put her hand over her eyes, as if to shut out some unwelcome sight.
“Yes,” he said, swinging his foot, his head sunk upon his breast; “that is just about what it is: and I am a—a—everything that is bad. But not such a cad as to let another man be ruined instead of me,” he cried.
Evelyn got up to her feet, stumbling, not seeing where she went, her eyes blinded with tears. “Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy!” she cried, putting her arms round him, drawing him to her.
“Is that how you take it?” he said, with a sob. “I did not expect you to take it like that.”
“Oh, Eddy!” she said, not able to find other words; “oh, my poor boy!”
He drew himself away from her a little, dashing off the tears that were in his eyes. “You know what that means, Mrs. Rowland,” he said, “though you may be sorry for me, and he may forgive me for your sake; but it is separation for ever. I mustn’t presume to let you be kind to me.” He took her back to her chair and placed her in it, and kissed her hand. And then he took up his hat. “It could mean nothing else, and I should be too thankful that he takes no step. Of course, I shall never see any of you again.” Then he suddenly laughed out, the colour coming back to his face. “And I was fond of that little Marion,” he said; “I was, though you might not think it, and she did not deserve it any more than I do. I was—but all that’s at an end now.”