Читать книгу Studies in Wives - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 4

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"His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it shall bring him to the king of terrors."—Job xviii. 14.

There came the sound of a discreet, embarrassed cough, and Althea Scrope turned quickly round from the window by which she had been standing still dressed in her outdoor things.

She had heard the door open, the unfolding of the tea-table, the setting down of the tea-tray, but her thoughts had been far away from the old house in Westminster which was now her home; her thoughts had been in Newcastle, dwelling for a moment among the friends of her girlhood, for whom she had been buying Christmas gifts that afternoon.

The footman's cough recalled her to herself, and to the present.

"Am I to say that you are at home this afternoon, ma'am?"

Althea's thoughtful, clear eyes rested full on the youth's anxious face. He had not been long in the Scropes' service, and this was the first time he had been left in such a position of responsibility, but Dockett, the butler, was out, a rare event, for Dockett liked to be master in his master's house. Before the marriage of Perceval Scrope, Dockett had been Scrope's valet, and, as Althea was well aware, the man still regarded her as an interloper. Althea did not like Dockett, but Perceval was very fond of him, and generally spoke of him to his friends as "Trip." Althea had never been able to discover the reason of the nickname, and she had not liked to ask; her husband often spoke a language strange to her.

"I will see Mr. Bustard if he comes," she said gently.

Dockett would not have disturbed her by asking the question, for Dockett always knew, by a sort of instinct, whom his master and mistress wished to see or to avoid seeing.

Again she turned and stared out of the high, narrow, curtainless windows. Perceval Scrope did not like curtains, and so of course there were no curtains in his wife's drawing-room.

Snow powdered the ground. It blew in light eddies about the bare branches of the trees marking the carriage road through St. James's Park, and was caught in whirling drifts on the frozen sheet of water which reflected the lights on the bridge spanning the little lake. Even at this dreary time of the year it was a charming outlook, and one which most of Althea's many acquaintances envied her.

And yet the quietude of the scene at which she was gazing so intently oppressed her, and, suddenly, from having felt warm after her walk across the park, Althea Scrope felt cold.

She moved towards the fireplace, and the flames threw a red glow on her tall, rounded figure, creeping up from the strong serviceable boots to the short brown skirt, and so to the sable cape which had been one of her husband's wedding gifts, but which now looked a little antiquated in cut and style.

It is a bad thing—a sign that all is not right with her—when a beautiful young woman becomes indifferent to how she looks. This was the case with Althea, and yet she was only twenty-two, and looked even younger; no one meeting her by chance would have taken her to be a married woman, still less the wife of a noted politician.

She took off her fur cape and put it on a chair. She might have sent for her maid, but before her marriage she had always waited on herself, and she was not very tidy—one of her few points of resemblance with her husband, and not one which made for harmony. But Mrs. Scrope, if untidy, was also conscientious, and as she looked at the damp fur cloak her conscience began to trouble her.

She rang the bell. "Take my cloak and hang it up carefully in the hall," she said to the footman. And now the room was once more neat and tidy as she knew her friend, Mr. Bustard, would like to see it.

It was a curious and delightful room, but it resembled and reflected the woman who had to spend so much of her life there as little as did her quaint and fanciful name of Althea. Her husband, in a fit of petulance at some exceptional density of vision, had once told her that her name should have been Jane—Jane, Maud, Amy, any of those old-fashioned, early Victorian names would have suited Althea, and Althea's outlook on life when she had married Perceval Scrope.

Althea's drawing-room attained beauty, not only because of its proportions, and its delightful outlook on St. James's Park, but also because quite a number of highly intelligent people had seen to it that it should be beautiful.

Although Scrope, who thought he knew his young wife so well, would have been surprised and perhaps a little piqued if he had been told it, Althea preferred the house as it had been before her marriage, in the days when it was scarcely furnished, when this room, for instance, had been the library-smoking-room of its owner, an owner too poor to offer himself any of the luxurious fitments which had been added to make it suitable for his rich bride.

As soon as Scrope's engagement to the provincial heiress Althea then was had been announced, his friends—and he was a man of many friends—had delighted to render him the service of making the pleasant old house in Delahay Street look as it perchance had looked eighty or a hundred years ago. The illusion was almost perfect, so cleverly had the flotsam of Perceval Scrope's ancestral possessions been wedded to the jetsam gathered in curiosity shops and at country auctions—for the devotion of Scrope's friends had gone even to that length.

This being so, it really seemed a pity that these same kind folk had not been able to—oh! no, not buy, that is an ugly word, and besides it had been Perceval who had been bought, not Althea—to acquire for Scrope a wife who would have suited the house as well as the house suited Scrope.

But that had not been possible.

Even as it was, the matter of marrying their friend had not been easy. Scrope was so wilful—that was why they loved him! He had barred—absolutely barred—Americans, and that although everybody knows how useful an American heiress can be, not only with her money, but with her brightness and her wits, to an English politician. He had also stipulated for a country girl, and he would have preferred one straight out of the school-room.

Almost all his conditions had been fulfilled. Althea was nineteen at the time of her marriage, and, if not exactly country-bred—she was the only child of a Newcastle magnate—she had seen nothing of the world to which Scrope and Scrope's Egeria, the woman who had actually picked out Althea to be Scrope's wife, had introduced her.

Scrope's Egeria? At the time my little story opens, Althea had long given up being jealous—jealous, that is, in the intolerant, passionate sense of the word; in fact, she was ashamed that she had ever been so, for she now felt sure that Perceval would not have liked her, Althea, any better, even if there had not been another woman to whom he turned for flattery and sympathy.

The old ambiguous term was, in this case, no pseudonym for another and more natural, if uglier, relationship on the part of a married man, and of a man whom the careless public believed to be on exceptionally good terms with his young wife.

Scrope's Egeria was twenty-four years older than Althea, and nine years older than Scrope himself. Unfortunately she had a husband who, unlike Althea, had the bad taste, the foolishness, to be jealous of her close friendship with Perceval Scrope. And yet, while admitting to herself the man's folly, Althea had a curious liking for Egeria's husband. There was, in fact, more between them than their common interest in the other couple; for he, like Althea, provided what old-fashioned people used to call the wherewithal; he, like Althea, had been married because of the gifts he had brought in his hands, the gifts not only of that material comfort which counts for so much nowadays, but those which, to Scrope's Egeria, counted far more than luxury, that is, beauty of surroundings and refinement of living.

Mr. and Mrs. Panfillen—to give Egeria and her husband their proper names—lived quite close to Althea and Perceval Scrope, for they dwelt in Old Queen Street, within little more than a stone's throw of Delahay Street.

Joan Panfillen, unlike Althea Scrope, was exquisitely suited to her curious, old-world dwelling. She had about her small, graceful person, her picturesque and dateless dress, even in her low melodious voice, that harmony which is, to the man capable of appreciating it, the most desirable and perhaps the rarest of feminine attributes.

There was one thing which Althea greatly envied Mrs. Panfillen, and that was nothing personal to herself; it was simply the tiny formal garden which divided the house in Old Queen Street from Birdcage Walk. This garden looked fresher and greener than its fellows because, by Mrs. Panfillen's care, the miniature parterres were constantly tended and watered, while the shrubs both summer and winter were washed and cleansed as carefully as was everything else likely to be brought in contact with their owner's wife.

In spite of the fact that they lived so very near to one another, the two women were not much together, and as a rule they only met, but that was, of course, very often, when out in the political and social worlds to which they both belonged.

Althea had a curious shrinking from the Panfillens' charming house. It was there, within a very few weeks of her father's death, that she had first met Perceval Scrope—and there that he had conducted his careless wooing. It was in Mrs. Panfillen's boudoir, an octagon-shaped room on the park side of the house, that he had actually made his proposal, and that Althea, believing herself to be "in love," and uplifted by the solemn and yet joyful thought of how happy such a marriage—her marriage to a member of the first Fair Food Cabinet—would have made her father, had accepted him.

From Old Queen Street also had taken place her wedding, which, if nominally quiet, because the bride still chose to consider herself in deep mourning, had filled St. Margaret's with one of those gatherings only brought together on such an occasion—a gathering in which the foemen of yesterday, and the enemies of to-morrow, unite with the friends of to-day in order to do honour to a fellow-politician.

Althea had darker memories connected with Mrs. Panfillen's house. She had spent there, immediately after her honeymoon, an unhappy fortnight, waiting for the workpeople to leave her future home in Delahay Street. It was during that fortnight that for the first time her girlish complacency had forsaken her, and she had been made to understand how inadequate her husband found her to the position she was now called upon to fill. It was then that there had first come to her the humiliating suspicion that her bridegroom could not forgive her his own sale of himself. Scrope and Joan Panfillen were subtle people, living in a world of subtleties, yet in this subtle, unspoken matter of Scrope's self-contempt concerning his marriage, the simple Althea's knowledge far preceded theirs.

In those days Joan Panfillen, kindest, most loyal of hostesses, had always been taking the bride's part, but how unkind—yes, unkind was the word—Perceval was, even then!

Althea had never forgotten one little incident connected with that time, and this afternoon she suddenly remembered it with singular vividness. Scrope had been caricatured in Punch as Scrooge; and—well—Althea had not quite understood.

"Good Lord!" he had exclaimed, turning to the older woman, "Althea doesn't know who Scrooge was!" and quickly he had proceeded to put his young wife through a sharp, and to her a very bewildering examination, concerning people and places some of whom she had never heard of, while others seemed vaguely, worryingly familiar. He had ended up with the words, "And I suppose you consider yourself educated!" A chance muttered word had then told her that none of these places were real—that none of these people Perceval had spoken of with such intimate knowledge, had ever lived!

Althea had felt bitterly angered as well as hurt. Tears had welled up into her brown eyes; and Mrs. Panfillen, intervening with far more eager decision than she generally showed about even important matters, had cried, "That's not fair! In fact you are being quite absurd, Perceval! I've never cared for Dickens, and I'm sure most people, at any rate most women, who say they like him are pretending—pretending all the time! I don't believe there's a girl in London who could answer the questions you put to Althea just now, and if there is such a girl then she's a literary monster, and I for one don't want to know her."

As only answer Scrope had turned and put a thin brown finger under Althea's chin. "Crying?" he had said, "Baby! She shan't be made to learn her Dickens if she doesn't want to, so there!"

At the time Althea had tried to smile, but the words her husband had used had hurt her, horribly, for they had seemed to cast a reflection on her father—the father who thought so much of education, and who had been at such pains to obtain for his motherless only child an ideal chaperon-governess, a lady who had always lived with the best families in Newcastle. Miss Burt would certainly have made her pupil read Dickens if Dickens were in any real sense an educating influence, instead of writing, as Althea had always understood he did, only about queer and vulgar people.

Not educated? Why, her father had sent her away from him for a whole year to Dresden, in order that she might learn German and study music to the best possible advantage! True, she had not learnt her French in France, for her father had a prejudice against the French; he belonged to a generation which admired Germany, and disliked and distrusted the French. She had, however, been taught French by an excellent teacher, a French Protestant lady who had lived all her life in England. Of course Althea had never read a French novel, but she could recite, even now, whole pages of Racine and Corneille by heart.

And yet, even in this matter of languages, Perceval was unfair, for some weeks after he had said that cruel thing to her about education, and when they were at last settling down in their own house, arranging the details of their first dinner party, he had said to her with a certain abrupt ill-humour, "The one language I thought you did know was menu-French!"

Joan Panfillen was also disappointed in Althea. Scrope's Egeria had hoped to convert Scrope's wife, not into a likeness of herself—she was far too clever a woman to hope to do that—but into a bright, cheerful companion for Perceval Scrope's lighter hours. She had always vaguely supposed that this was the rôle reserved to pretty, healthy young women possessed of regular features, wavy brown hair, and good teeth. …

But Mrs. Panfillen had soon realised, and the knowledge brought with it much unease and pain, that she had made a serious mistake in bringing about the marriage. And yet it had been necessary to do something; there had come a moment when not only she, but even Scrope himself, had felt that he must be lifted out of the class—always distrusted and despised in England—of political adventurers. Scrope required, more than most men, the solid platform, nay, the pedestal, of wealth, and accordingly his Egeria had sacrificed herself and, incidentally, the heiress, Althea.

But, as so often happens to those who make the great renouncement, Joan Panfillen found that after all no such thing as true sacrifice was to be required of her.

After his marriage, Scrope was more often with her than he had ever been, and far more willing, not only to ask but to take, his Egeria's advice on all that concerned his brilliant, meteoric career. He seldom mentioned his wife, but Mrs. Panfillen knew her friend far too well not to know how it was with him; Althea fretted his nerves, offended his taste, jarred his conscience, at every turn of their joint life.

There were, however, two meagre things to the good—Althea's fortune, the five thousand a year, which now, after four years, did not seem so large an income as it had seemed at first; and the fact that Scrope's marriage had extinguished the odious, and, what was much more unpleasant to such a woman as was Joan Panfillen, the ridiculous, jealousy of Joan's husband.

Thomas Panfillen greatly admired Althea; he thought her what she was—a very lovely young woman, and the fact that he had known her father made him complacently suppose that he had brought about her marriage to the peculiar, he was told the remarkably clever, if rather odd, Perceval Scrope.

Baulked of certain instinctive rights, the human heart seeks compensation as surely as water seeks its level. Althea, unknown to herself, had a compensation. His name was John Bustard. He was in a public office—to be precise, the Privy Council Office. He lived in rooms not far from his work, that is, not far from Delahay Street, and he had got into the way of dropping in to tea two, three, sometimes even four times a week.

The fact that Bustard was an old schoolfellow of Scrope's had been his introduction to Althea in the early days when she had been conscientiously anxious to associate herself with her husband's interests past and present. But of the innumerable people with whom Scrope had brought her into temporary contact, Mr. Bustard—she always called him Mr. Bustard, as did most other people—was the one human being who, being the fittest as regarded herself, survived.

And yet never had there been a man less suited to play the part of hero, or even of consoler. Mr. Bustard was short, and his figure was many years older than his age, which was thirty-four. While forcing himself to take two constitutionals a day, he indulged in no other manlier form of exercise, and his contempt for golf was the only thing that tended to a lack of perfect understanding between his colleagues and himself. He was interested in his work, but he tried to forget it when he was not at the office. Bustard was a simple soul, but blessed with an unformulated, though none the less real, philosophy of life.

Of the matter nearest his heart he scarcely ever spoke, partly because he had always supposed it to be uninteresting to anyone but himself, and also on account of a certain thorny pride which prevented his being willing to ask favours from the indifferent.

This matter nearest Mr. Bustard's heart concerned his two younger brothers and an orphan sister whom he supremely desired to do the best for, and to set well forward in life.

It was of these three young people that he and Althea almost always talked, and if Althea allowed herself to have an ardent wish, it was that her husband would permit her to invite Mr. Bustard's sister for a few weeks when the girl left the German finishing school which she and Mr. Bustard had chosen, after much anxious deliberation, a year before.

It soothed Althea's sore heart to know that there was at least one person in her husband's circle who thought well of her judgment, who trusted in her discretion, and who did her the compliment of not only asking, but also of taking her advice.

John Bustard had formed a very good opinion of Althea, and, constitutionally incapable of divining the causes which had determined the choice of Scrope's wife, he considered Mrs. Scrope a further proof, if indeed proof were needed, of his brilliant schoolfellow's acute intelligence. He had ventured to say as much to Scrope's late official chief, one of the few men to whom Mr. Bustard, without a sufficient cause, would have mentioned a lady's name. But he had been taken aback, rather disturbed, by the old statesman's dry comment: "Ay, there's always been method in Scrope's madness. I agree that he has made, from his own point of view, a very good marriage."

His wife's friendship with Mr. Bustard did not escape Perceval Scrope's ironic notice. He affected to think his old schoolfellow a typical member of the British public, and he had nicknamed him "the Bullometer," but, finding that his little joke vexed Althea, he had, with unusual consideration, dropped it.

Unfortunately the one offensive epithet was soon exchanged for another; in allusion doubtless to some historical personage of whom Althea had no knowledge, Scrope began to call Bustard her fat friend. "How's your fat friend?" he would ask, and a feeling of resentment filled Althea's breast. It was not John Bustard's fault that he had a bad figure; it was caused by the sedentary nature of his work, and because, instead of spending his salary in the way most civil servants spend theirs, that is in selfish amusements, he spent it on his younger brothers, and on his little sister's education.

Althea again went over to the window and looked out. It had now left off snowing, and the mists were gathering over the park. Soon a veil of fog would shut out the still landscape. If Mr. Bustard were coming this afternoon she hoped he would come soon, and so be gone before Perceval came in.

Perceval was going to make a great speech in the House to-night, and Althea was rather ashamed that she did not care more. He had been put up to speak against those who had once been of his own political household and who now regarded him as a renegade, but the subject was one sure to inspire him, for it was that which he had made his own, and which had led to his secession from his party. Althea and Mrs. Panfillen were going together to hear the speech, but, to his wife's surprise, Scrope had refused to dine with the Panfillens that same evening.

Perceval Scrope had not been well. To his vexation the fact had been mentioned in the papers. The intense cold had tried him—the cold, and a sudden visit to his constituency.

Althea could not help feeling slightly contemptuous of Perceval's physical delicacy. Her husband had often looked ill lately, not as ill as people told her he looked, but still very far from well. Only to herself did Althea say what she felt sure was the truth, namely that Perceval's state was due to himself, due to his constant rushing about, to the way in which he persistently over-excited himself; last, but by no means least, to the way he ate and drank when the food and drink pleased him.

Althea judged her husband with the clear, pitiless eyes of youth, but none of those about her knew that she so judged him. Indeed, there were some in her circle, kindly amiable folk, who believed, and said perhaps a little too loudly, that Althea was devoted to Perceval, and that their marriage was one of those delightful unions which are indeed made in Heaven. …

From the further corner of the room there came the sharp ring of the telephone bell. No doubt a message saying that Perceval had altered his plans and was dining out, alone.

Insensibly Althea's lips tightened. She thought she knew what her husband was about to suggest. She felt sure that he would tell her, as he had told her so many times before when he had failed her, to offer herself to Mrs. Panfillen for dinner.

But no—the voice she heard calling her by name was not that of Perceval Scrope. It was a woman's voice, and it seemed to float towards her from a far distance. "Althea," called the strange voice, "Althea."

"Yes?" she said, "who is it? I can hardly hear you," and then, with startling closeness and clearness—the telephone plays one such tricks—came the answer in a voice she knew well, "It is I—Joan Panfillen! Are you alone, Althea? Yes? Ah! that's good! I want you to do me a kindness, dear. I want you to come round here now—at once. Don't tell anyone you are coming to me. I have a reason for this. Can you hear what I say, Althea?"

"Yes," said the listener hesitatingly, "yes, I hear you quite well now, Joan."

"Come in by the park side, I mean through the garden—the gate is unlocked, and I will let you in by the window. Be careful as you walk across the flags, it's very slippery to-night. Can you come now, at once?"

Althea hesitated a moment. Then she answered, in her low, even voice, "Yes, I'll come now, at once."

A kindness? What kindness could she, Althea Scrope, do Joan Panfillen? The fear of the other woman, the hidden distrust with which she regarded her, gathered sudden force. Not lately, but in the early days of Scrope's marriage, Mrs. Panfillen had more than once tried to use her friend's wife, believing—strange that she should have made such a mistake—that Althea might succeed where she herself had failed in persuading Scrope for his own good. Althea now told herself that no doubt Joan wished to see her on some matter connected with Perceval's coming speech.

As this thought came to her Althea's white forehead wrinkled in vexed thought. It was too bad that she should have to go out now, when she was expecting Mr. Bustard, to whom she had one or two rather important things to say about his sister——But stay, why should he be told that she was out? Why indeed should she be still out when Mr. Bustard did come? It was not yet five o'clock, and he seldom came before a quarter past. With luck she might easily go over to Joan Panfillen's house and be back before he came.

Althea walked quickly out of the drawing-room and down into the hall. Her fur cloak had been carefully hung up as she had directed. Perceval always said Luke was a stupid servant, but she liked Luke; he was careful, honest, conscientious, a very different type of man from the butler, Dockett.

Althea passed out into the chilly, foggy air. Delahay Street, composed of a few high houses, looked dark, forbidding, deserted. She had often secretly wondered why her husband chose to live in such a place. Of course she knew that their friends raved about the park side of the house, but the wife of Perceval Scrope scarcely ever went in or out of her own door without remembering a dictum of her father's: "Nothing makes up for a good front entrance."

Althea walked quickly towards Great George Street; to the left she passed Boar's Head Yard, where lived an old cabman in whom she took an interest, and whose cab generally stood at Storey's Gate.

How strange to think that here had once stood Oliver Cromwell's house! Her husband had told her this fact very soon after their marriage; it had seemed to please him very much that they lived so near the spot where Cromwell had once lived. Althea even at the time had thought this pleasure odd, in fact affected, on Perceval's part.

If the great Protector's house stood there now, filled with interesting little relics of the man, she could have understood, perhaps to a certain extent sympathised with, Perceval's feeling, for Cromwell had been one of her father's heroes. But to care or pretend to care for a vanished association——!

But Perceval was like that. No man living—or so Althea believed—was so full of strange whimsies and fads as was Perceval Scrope! And so thinking of him she suddenly remembered, with a tightening of the heart, how often her husband's feet had trodden the way she was now treading, hastening from the house which she had just left to the house to which she was now going.

Jealous of Joan Panfillen? Nay, Althea assured herself that there was no room in her heart for jealousy, but it was painful, even more, it was hateful, to know that there were people who pitied her because of this peculiar intimacy between Perceval and Joan. Why, quite lately, there had been a recrudescence of talk about their friendship, so an ill-bred busybody had hinted to Althea only the day before.

The wife was dimly aware that there had been a time when Mrs. Panfillen had hoped to form with her an unspoken compact; each would have helped the other, that is, to "manage" Perceval; but the moment when such an alliance would have been possible had now gone for ever—even if it had ever existed. Althea would have had to have been a different woman—older, cleverer, less scrupulous, more indifferent than she was, even now, to the man she had married, to make such a compact possible.

When about to cross Great George Street she stopped and hesitated. Why should she do this thing, why leave her house at Joan Panfillen's bidding? But Althea, even as she hesitated, knew that she would go on. She had said that she was coming, and she was not one to break lightly even a light word.

As she crossed Storey's Gate, she noticed the stationary cab of the old man who lived in Boar's Head Yard. It had been standing there when she had come in from her walk, and she felt a thrill of pity—the old man made a gallant fight against misfortune. She and Joan Panfillen were both very kind to him.

Althea told herself that this sad world is full of real trouble, and the thought made her ashamed of the feelings which she had just allowed to possess and shake her with jealous pain. And yet—yet, though many people envied her, how far from happy Althea knew herself to be, and how terribly grey her life now looked, stretching out in front of her.

As she passed into Birdcage Walk, and came close to the little iron gate which Mrs. Panfillen had told her was unlocked, she saw that a woman stood on the path of the tiny garden behind the railings.

Of course it was not Joan herself; the thought that Joan, delicate, fragile as she was, would come out into the cold, foggy air was unthinkable; scarcely less strange was it to see standing there, cloakless and hatless, Joan's maid, a tall, gaunt, grey-haired woman named Bolt, who in the long ago had been nurse to the Panfillens' dead child. Scrope had told Althea the story of the brief tragedy very early in his acquaintance with her; he had spoken with strong feeling, and that although the child had been born, had lived, and had died before he himself had known Joan.

In the days when she had been Mrs. Panfillen's guest, that is before her marriage, Althea had known the maid well, known and liked her grim honesty of manner, but since Althea's marriage to Perceval Scrope there had come a change over Bolt's manner. She also had made Althea feel that she was an interloper, and now the sight of the woman standing waiting in the cold mist disturbed her.

Bolt looked as if she had been there a very long time, and yet Althea had hurried; she was even a little breathless. As she touched the gate, she saw that it swung loosely. Everything had been done to make her coming easy; how urgent must be Joan's need of her!

Althea became oppressed with a vague fear. She looked at the maid questioningly. "Is Mrs. Panfillen ill?" she asked. The other shook her head. "There's nothing ailing Mrs. Panfillen," she said in a low voice.

Together, quite silently, they traversed the flagged path, and then Bolt did a curious thing. She preceded her mistress's visitor up the iron steps leading to the boudoir window, and leaving her there, on the little balcony, went down again into the garden, and once more took up her station near the gate as if mounting guard.

The long French window giving access to the boudoir was closed, and in the moment that elapsed before it was opened from within Althea Scrope took unconscious note of the room she knew so well, and of everything in it, including the figure of the woman she had come to see.

It was a panelled octagon, the panels painted a pale Wedgwood blue, while just below the ceiling concave medallions were embossed with flower garlands and amorini.

A curious change had been made since Althea had last seen the room. An old six-leaved screen, of gold so faded as to have become almost silver in tint, which had masked the door, now stood exactly opposite the window behind which Althea was standing. It concealed the straight Empire sofa which, as Mr. Panfillen was fond of telling his wife's friends, on the very rare occasions when he found himself in this room with one of them, had formerly stood in the Empress Josephine's boudoir at Malmaison; and, owing to the way it was now placed, the old screen formed a delicate and charming background to Mrs. Panfillen's figure.

Scrope's Egeria stood in the middle of the room waiting for Scrope's wife. She was leaning forward in a curious attitude, as if she were listening, and the lemon-coloured shade of the lamp standing on the table threw a strange gleam on her lavender silk gown, fashioned, as were ever the clothes worn by Joan Panfillen, with a certain austere simplicity and disregard of passing fashion.

Althea tapped at the window, and the woman who had sent for her turned round, and, stepping forward, opened the window wide.

"Come in!" she cried. "Come in, Althea—how strange that you had to knock! I've been waiting for you so long."

"I came as quickly as I could—I don't think I can have been five minutes."

Althea stepped through the window, bringing with her a blast of cold, damp air. She looked questioningly at Mrs. Panfillen. She felt, she hardly knew why, trapped. The other's look of anxious, excited scrutiny disturbed her.

Mrs. Panfillen's fair face, usually pale, was flushed.

So had she reddened, suddenly, when Althea had come to tell her of her engagement to Perceval Scrope. So had she looked when standing on the doorstep as Althea and Perceval started for their honeymoon, just after there had taken place a strange little scene—for Scrope, following the example of Thomas Panfillen, who had insisted on what he called saluting the bride, had taken Panfillen's wife into his arms and kissed her.

"Althea"—Joan took the younger woman's hand in hers and held it, closely, as she spoke, "don't be frightened—but Perceval is here, ill—and I've sent for you to take him home."

"Ill?" A look of dismay came over Althea's face. "I hope he's not too ill to speak to-night—that would be dreadful—he'd be terribly upset, terribly disappointed!" Even as she spoke she knew she was using words which to the other would seem exaggerated, a little childish.

"I'm sure he'd rather you took him home, I'm sure he'd rather not be found——" Mrs. Panfillen hesitated a moment, and again she said the words "'ill', 'here'," and for the first time Althea saw that there was a look of great pain and strain on Joan's worn, sensitive face.

"Of course not!" said the young wife quickly. "Of course he mustn't be ill here; he must come home, at once."

Althea's pride was protesting hotly against her husband's stopping a moment in a house where he was not wanted—pride and a certain resentment warring together in her heart. How strange London people were! This woman whom folk—the old provincial word rose to her lips—whom folk whispered was over-fond of Perceval—why, no sooner was he ill than her one thought was how to get rid of him quietly and quickly!

Mrs. Panfillen, looking at her, watching with agonised intensity the slow workings of Althea's mind, saw quite clearly what Perceval's wife was feeling, saw it with a bitter sense of what a few moments ago she would have thought inconceivable she could ever feel again—amusement.

She went across to the window and opened it. As if in answer to a signal, the little iron gate below swung widely open: "Bolt has gone to get a cab," she said, without turning round; "we thought that it would be simplest. The old cabman knows us all—it will be quicker." She spoke breathlessly, but there was a tone of decision in her voice, a gentle restrained tone, but one which Althea knew well to spell finality.

"But where is Perceval?"

Althea looked round her bewildered. She noticed, for the first time, that flung carelessly across two chairs lay his outdoor coat, his gloves, his stick, his hat. Then he also had come in by the park side of the house?

Mrs. Panfillen went towards her with slow, hesitating steps.

"He is here," she said in a low tone, "behind the screen. He was sitting on the sofa reading me the notes of his speech, and—and he fell back." She began moving the screen, and as she did so she went on, "I sent for Bolt—she was a nurse once, you know, and she got the brandy which you see there——"

But Althea hardly heard the words; she was gazing, with an oppressed sense of discomfort and fear, at her husband. Yes, Perceval looked ill—very ill—and he was lying in so peculiar a position! "I suppose when people faint they have to put them like that," thought Althea to herself, but she felt concerned, a little frightened. …

Perceval Scrope lay stretched out stiffly on the sofa, his feet resting on a chair which had been placed at the end of the short, frail-looking little couch. His fair, almost lint white, hair was pushed back from his forehead, showing its unusual breadth. The grey eyes were half closed, and he was still wearing, wound about his neck so loosely that it hid his mouth and chin, a silk muffler.

Althea had the painful sensation that he did not like her to be there, that it must be acutely disagreeable to him to feel that she saw him in such a condition of helplessness and unease. And yet she went on looking at him, strangely impressed, not so much by the rigidity, as by the intense stillness of his body. Scrope as a rule was never still; when he was speaking, his whole body, each of his limbs, spoke with him.

By the side of the sofa was a small table, on which stood a decanter, unstoppered.

"Has he been like that long?" Althea whispered at length. "He—he looks so strange."

Joan Panfillen came close up to the younger woman; again she put her hand on her companion's arm.

"Althea," she said, "don't you understand? Can't you see the dreadful thing that has happened?"—and as the other looked down into the quivering face turned up to hers, she added with sudden passion, "Should I want you to take him away if he were still here?—should I want him to go if there were anything left that I could do for him?"

And then Althea at last understood, and so understanding her mind for once moved quickly, and she saw with mingled terror and revolt what it was that the woman on whose face her eyes were now riveted was requiring of her.

"You sent for me to take him home—dead?"

It was a statement rather than a question. Mrs. Panfillen made a scarcely perceptible movement of assent. "It is what he would have wished," she whispered, "I am quite sure it is what he would have wished you to do."

"I—I am sorry, but I don't think I can do that."

Althea was speaking to herself rather than to the other woman. She was grappling with a feeling of mortal horror and fear. She had always been afraid of Perceval Scrope, afraid and yet fascinated, and now he, dead, seemed to be even more formidable, more beckoning, than he had been alive.

She turned away and covered her eyes with her hand. "Why did you tell me?" she asked, a little wildly. "If you hadn't told me that he was dead I should never have known. I should even have done the—the dreadful thing you want me to do."

"Bolt thought that—Bolt said you would not know," Mrs. Panfillen spoke with sombre energy. "She wished me to allow her to take him down into the garden to meet you in the darkness——But—but Althea, that would have been an infamous thing from me to you——" She waited a moment, and then in a very different voice, in her own usual measured and gentle accents, she added, "My dear, forgive me. We will never speak of this again. I was wrong, selfish, to think of subjecting you to such an ordeal. All I ask"—and there came into her tone a sound of shamed pleading—"is that you should allow Tom—Tom and other people—to think that you were here when it happened."

Althea remained silent. Then, uncertainly, she walked across to the window and opened it. The action was symbolic—and so it was understood by the woman watching her so anxiously.

But still Althea said nothing. She stood looking out into the darkness, welcoming the feel of the cold damp air. She gave herself a few brief moments—they seemed very long moments to Joan Panfillen—before she said the irrevocable words, and when she did say them, they sounded muffled, and uttered from far away, for Althea as she spoke did not turn round; she feared to look again on that which might unnerve her, render her unfit for what she was about to do.

"Joan," she said, "I will do what you ask. You were right just now—right, I mean, in telling me what Perceval would have wished."

She spoke with nervous, dry haste, and, to her relief, the other woman spared her thanks. …

There was a long silence, and then Mrs. Panfillen crept up close to Althea and touched her, making her start violently. "Then I will call Bolt," she said, and made as if to pass through the window, but Althea stopped her with a quick movement of recoil—"No, no!" she cried, "let me do that!" and she ran down the iron steps; it was good to be out of sight even for a moment of the still presence of the dead—the dead whose mocking spirit seemed to be still terribly alive.

But during the long, difficult minutes that followed, it was Joan Panfillen, not Althea Scrope, who shrank and blenched. It was Althea who put out her young strength to help to lift the dead man, and, under cover of the sheltering mist, to make the leaden feet retrace their steps down the iron stairway, and along the narrow path they had so often leapt up and along with eager haste.

To two of the three women the progress seemed intolerably slow, but to Althea it was all too swift; she dreaded with an awful dread the companioned drive which lay before her.

Perhaps something of what she was feeling was divined by Mrs. Panfillen, for at the very last Scrope's Egeria forgot self, and made, in all sincerity, an offer which on her part was heroic.

"Shall I come with you?" she whispered, averting her eyes from that which lay huddled up by Althea's side, "I will come, willingly; let me come—Althea."

But Althea only shook her head in cold, hurried refusal. She felt that with speech would go a measure of her courage.

Afterwards Althea remembered that there had come a respite—what had seemed to her at the time an inexplicable delay. A man and a girl had gone slowly by, staring curiously at the two bare-headed women standing out on the pavement, and on whose pale faces there fell the quivering gleam of the old-fashioned cab lamp. Then, when the footfalls of these passers-by had become faint, Bolt spoke to the driver, and handed him some money. Althea heard the words as in dream, "Get along as quick as you can to 24, Delahay Street, there's a good man," and then the clink of silver in the stillness, followed by the full sound of the man's wheezy gratitude.

There came a sudden movement and the dread drive began, the horse slipping, the cab swaying and jolting over the frozen ground.

With a gesture which was wholly instinctive, Althea put out her arm—her firm, rounded, living arm—and slipped it round the inert, sagging thing which had been till an hour ago Perceval Scrope. And, as she did so, as she pressed him to her, and kept from him the ignominy of physical helplessness, there came a great lightening of her spirit.

Fear, the base fear bred of the imagination, fell away from her. For the first time there came the certainty that her husband was at last satisfied with her; for the first time she was able to do Perceval Scrope dead what she had never been able to do Perceval Scrope alive, a great service—a service which she might have refused to do.

Once or twice, very early in their married life, Perceval had praised her, and his praise had given Althea exquisite pleasure because it was so rare, so seldom lavished; and this long-lost feeling of joy in her husband's approval came back, filling her eyes with tears. Now at last Althea felt as if she and Perceval Scrope were one, fused in that kindly sympathy and understanding which, being the manner of woman she was, Althea supposed to be the very essence of conjugal love.

As they were clasped together, she, the quick, he, the dead, Althea lost count of time; it might have been a moment, it might have been an hour, when at last the jolting ceased.

As the old man got off the box of his cab, and rang the bell, Big Ben boomed out the quarter-past five.

Since she had last gone through that door a yawning gap had come in Althea's life, a gap which she had herself bridged. Fear had dropped from her; she could never again be afraid as she had been afraid when she, Joan and Perceval had formed for the last time a trinity. The feeling which had so upheld her, the feeling that for the first time she and her husband were in unison, gave her not only courage but serenity of spirit. Althea shrank from acting a lie, but she saw, for the first time, through Perceval Scrope's eyes, and she admitted the necessity.

As the door opened, she remembered, almost with exultation, that Dockett, the butler, was out, and that it was only with Luke, the slow young footman, that she would have to deal. As she saw his tall, thin figure emerge hesitatingly into the street, Mrs. Scrope called out in a strong, confident voice, "Luke—come here! Help me to get Mr. Scrope indoors. He is ill; and as soon as we have got him into the morning room, you must go off for a doctor, at once——"

She waved aside the cabman almost impatiently, and it was Althea, Althea helped by Luke, who carried Perceval Scrope over the threshold of his own house, and so into a small room on the ground floor, a room opening out of the hall, and looking out on to the street.

"He looks very bad, don't 'e, ma'am?" Luke was startled out of his acquired passivity. "I'd better go right off now." She bent her head.

And then Althea, again alone with the dead man, suddenly became oppressed once more with fear, not the physical terror which had possessed her when Joan Panfillen had told her the awful truth, but none the less to her a very agonising form of fear. Althea was afraid that now, when approaching the end of her ordeal, she would fail Scrope and the woman he had loved. What was she to say, what story could she invent to tell those who would come and press her with quick eager questions? She knew herself to be incapable, not only of untruth, but of invention, and yet now both were about to be required of her.

Althea turned out the lights, and wandered out into the hall. She felt horribly lonely; with the exception of the kindly, stupid youth who had now gone to find a doctor, there was not a member of her considerable household in sufficient human sympathy with her to be called to her aid.

She remembered with a pang that this question of their servants had been one of the many things concerning which there had been deep fundamental disagreement between her husband and herself. She had been accustomed to a well-ordered, decorous household, and would even have enjoyed managing such a one; but Perceval—Perceval influenced by Dockett—had ordained otherwise, and Althea had soon become uneasily aware that the order and decorum reigning below stairs were only apparent. Even now there came up from the basement the sound of loud talking, of unrestrained laughter.

Suddenly someone knocked at the door, a loud double knock which stilled, as if by magic, the murmur of the voices below.

Althea looked around her doubtfully, then she retreated into the darkened room, but no one came up, and she remembered that the other servants of course supposed Luke to be on duty. It might be—nay, it almost certainly was—the doctor. With faltering steps she again came out into the hall and opened the front door; and then, when she saw who it was who stood there, his kind honest eyes blinking in the sudden light, Althea began to cry.

The tears ran down her cheeks; she sighed convulsively, and John Bustard, looking at her with deep concern and dismay, was quite unaware—he does not know even to this day—that it was with relief.

"What is it?" he said. "My dear Mrs. Scrope—what is the matter? Would you like me to go away—or—or can I be of any use?"

"Oh, yes," she said piteously. "Indeed you can be of use. Don't go away—stay with me—I'm—I'm so frightened, Mr. Bustard. Perceval—poor Perceval is—is ill, and I'm afraid to stay in there with him."

And it was Mr. Bustard who at once took command—command of Althea, whom he ultimately ordered to bed; command of the excited household, whose excitement he sternly suppressed; it was Mr. Bustard who, believing he told truth, lied for Althea, first to the doctor, and later to the coroner.

"How fortunate it was for poor Althea that Mr. Bustard, that nice little man in the Privy Council Office, was actually in the house when poor Perceval Scrope's death took place!" bold and cruel people would say to Mrs. Panfillen, watching the while to see how she took their mention of the dead man's name.

"Yes," she would answer them quietly. "Very fortunate indeed. And it was so kind of Mr. Bustard to get his sister to go away with Althea. Poor Althea is so alone in the world. I hope she will come and stay with us when she comes back to town; we were Perceval Scrope's oldest, I might say closest, friends. You know that their marriage—his and Althea's—took place from our house?"

The only human being who scented a mystery was Dockett—Dockett, who was mindful, as he had a right to be, of his lawful perquisites, and who will never forgive himself for having been out on that fateful afternoon.

"I'd give something to know the whereabouts of Mr. Scrope's overcoat, to say nothing of his hat and stick. That common ash stick's a relic—it may be worth money some day!" he observed threateningly to the footman. But Luke, as only answer, stared at him with stolid dislike.

Luke had seen nothing of the hat and stick; no doubt they had been left in the cab in which Mr. Scrope had come back, ill, from the House. As for the overcoat, it had probably disappeared in the confusion, the hurried coming and going, of that evening when Luke had been almost run off his legs answering the door, and his head made quite giddy answering enquiries. But it was not Luke's business to say what he thought or did not think. With such a man as Mr. Dockett, it only led to unpleasantness.