Part 7 (2/2)

Already Tony's face showed his relief. She had given her promise reluctantly, but she would keep it now. Of that he felt a.s.sured, and, bidding her good-bye, he turned his horse and cantered back.

Pamela rode homewards more slowly. She had proposed to keep clear of entanglements and responsibilities, and, behold! the meshes were about her. She had undertaken a trust. In spite of herself she had ceased to be the looker-on.

CHAPTER VI

NEWS OF TONY

The promise which Pamela had given was a great relief to Tony; he went about the work of preparing for his departure with an easier mind. It was even in his thoughts when he stood with his wife upon the platform of Euston station, five minutes before his train started for Liverpool.

”She will be a good friend, Millie,” he said. ”Count on her till I send for you. I think I am right to go, even though I don't understand----”

He checked himself abruptly. Millie, however, paid heed only to the first clause of his sentence.

”Of course you are right,” she said, with a confidence which brought an answering smile to his face.

She watched the red tail-light of the train until it disappeared, and drove home alone to the big dreary house. It seemed ten times more dreary, ten times more silent than ever before. She was really alone now. But her confidence in herself and in Tony was still strong. ”I can wait,” she said, and the consciousness of her courage rejoiced her. She walked from room to room and sat for a few moments in each, realising that the coldness, the dingy look of the furniture, and the empty silence had no longer the power to oppress her. She even hesitated at the library door with her fingers on the key. But it was not until the next day that she unlocked it and threw it open.

For Pamela, mindful of her promise, called in the afternoon. Millicent was still uplifted by her confidence.

”I can wait quite patiently,” she said; and Pamela scrutinised her with some anxiety. For Millicent was speaking feverishly, as though she laboured under an excitement. Was her courage the mere effervescence of that excitement, or was it a steady, durable thing?

Pamela led her friend on to speak of the life which she and Tony had led in the big house, sounding her the while so that she might come upon some answer to that question. And thus it happened that, as they came down the stairs together, Millicent again stopped before the library door.

”Look!” she said. ”This room always seemed to me typical of the whole house, typical too of the lives we led in it.”

She unlocked the door suddenly and flung it open. The floor of the library was below the level of the hall, and a smooth plane of wood sloped down to it very gradually from the threshold.

”There used to be steps here once, but before my time,” said Millicent. She went down into the room. Pamela followed her, and understood why those two steps had been removed. Although the book-shelves rose on every wall from floor to ceiling, it was not as a library that this room was used. Heavy black curtains draped it with a barbaric profusion. The centre of the room was clear of furniture, and upon the carpet in that clear s.p.a.ce was laid a purple drugget; and on the drugget opposite to one another stood two strong wooden crutches.

The room was a mortuary chamber--nothing less. On those two crutches the dead were to lie awaiting burial.

Millie Stretton shook her shoulders with a kind of s.h.i.+ver.

”Oh, how I used to hate this room, hate knowing that it was here, prepared and ready!”

Pamela could understand how the knowledge would work upon a woman of emotions, whose nerves were already strung to exasperation by the life she led. For even to her there was something eerie in the disposition of the room. It looked out upon a dull yard of stone at the back of the house; the light was very dim and the noise of the streets hardly the faintest whisper; there was a chill and a dampness in the air.

”How I hated it,” Millie repeated. ”I used to lie awake and think of it. I used to imagine it more silent than any other of the silent rooms, and emptier--emptier because day and night it seemed to claim an inhabitant, and to claim it as a right. That was the horrible thing. The room was waiting--waiting for us to be carried down that wooden bridge and laid on the crutches here, each in our turn. It became just a symbol of the whole house. For what is the house, Pamela? A place that should have been a place of life, and is a place merely expecting death. Look at the books reaching up to the ceiling, never taken down, never read, for the room's a room for coffins. It wasn't merely a symbol of the house--that wasn't the worst of it. It was a sort of image of our lives, the old man's upstairs, Tony's and mine down here. We were all doing nothing, neither suffering nor enjoying, but just waiting--waiting for death. Nothing you see could happen in this house but death. Until it came there would only be silence and emptiness.”

Millie Stretton finished her outburst, and stood dismayed as though the shadow of those past days were still about her. The words she had spoken must have seemed exaggerated and even theatrical, but for the aspect of her as she spoke them. Her whole frame shuddered, her face had the shrinking look of fear. She recovered herself, however, in a moment.

”But that time's past,” she said. ”Tony's gone and I--I am waiting for life now. I am only a lodger, you see. A month or two, and I pack my boxes.”

She turned towards the door and stopped. The hall door had just at that moment opened. Pamela heard a man's footsteps sound heavily upon the floor of the hall and then upon the stairs.

”My father-in-law,” said Millie.

”This was his doing?” asked Pamela.

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