Part 28 (1/2)

”At any time you could have called him to your side, and you knew it. Now you have sent him away for always.”

During the week the sense of loss, the feeling that everything was unbearably incomplete, grew stronger and stronger within her. She had no heart for the losing battle in which she was engaged. A dangerous question began to force itself forward in her mind whenever her eyes rested upon Walter Hine. ”Was he worth while?” she asked herself: though as yet she did not define all that the ”while” connoted. The question was most prominent in her mind on the seventh day after the letter had been sent. She had persuaded Walter Hine to mount with her on to the down behind the house; they came to the great White Horse, and Hine, pleading fatigue, a plea which during these last days had been ever on his lips, flung himself down upon the gra.s.s. For a little time Sylvia sat idly watching the great battle s.h.i.+ps at firing-practice in the Bay. It was an afternoon of August; a light haze hung in the still air softening the distant promontories; and on the waveless sparkling sea the great s.h.i.+ps, coal-black to the eye, circled about the targets, with now and then a roar of thunder and a puff of smoke, like some monstrous engines of heat--heat stifling and oppressive. By sheer contrast, Sylvia began to dream of the cool glaciers; and the Chalet de Lognan suddenly stood visible before her eyes. She watched the sunlight die off the red rocks of the Chardonnet, the evening come with silent feet across the snow, and the starlit night follow close upon its heels; night fled as she dreamed.

She saw the ice-slope on the Aiguille d'Argentiere, she could almost hear the chip-chip of the axes as the steps were cut and the perpetual hiss as the ice-fragments streamed down the slope. Then she looked toward Walter Hine with the speculative inquiry which had come so often into her eyes of late. And as she looked, she saw him furtively take from a pocket a tabloid or capsule and slip it secretly into his mouth.

”How long have you been taking cocaine?” she asked, suddenly.

Walter Hine flushed scarlet and turned to her with a shrinking look.

”I don't,” he stammered.

”Yet you left a bottle of the drug where I found it.”

”That was not mine,” said he, still more confused. ”That was Archie Parminter's. He left it behind.”

”Yes,” said Sylvia, finding here a suspicion confirmed. ”But he left it for you?”

”And if I did take it,” said Hine, turning irritably to her, ”what can it matter to you? I believe that what your father says is true.”

”What does he say?”

”That you care for Captain Chayne, and that it's no use for any one else to think of you.”

Sylvia started.

”Oh, he says that!”

She understood now one of the methods of the new intrigue. Sylvia was in love with Chayne; therefore Walter Hine may console himself with cocaine.

It was not Garratt Skinner who suggested it. Oh, no! But Archie Parminter is invited for the night, takes the drug himself, or pretends to take it, praises it, describes how the use of it has grown in the West End and amongst the clubs, and then conveniently leaves the drug behind, and no doubt supplies it as it is required.

Sylvia began to dilate upon its ill-effects, and suddenly broke off. A great disgust was within her and stopped her speech. She got to her feet.

”Let us go home,” she said, and she went very quickly down the hill. When she came to the house she ran up-stairs to her room, locked the door and flung herself upon her bed. Walter Hine, her father, their plots and intrigues, were swept clean from her mind as of no account. Her struggle for the mastery became unimportant in her thoughts--a folly, a waste. For what her father had said was true; she cared for Chayne. And what she herself had said to Chayne when first he came to the House of the Running Water was no less true. ”If I loved, I think nothing else would count at all except that I loved.”

She had judged herself aright. She knew that, as she lay p.r.o.ne upon her bed, plunged in misery, while the birds called upon the boughs in the garden and the mill stream filled the room with its leaping music.

In a few minutes a servant knocked upon the door and told her that tea was ready in the library; but she returned no answer. And in a few minutes more--or so it seemed, but meanwhile the dusk had come--there came another knock and she was told that dinner had been served. But to that message again she returned no answer. The noises of the busy day ceased in the fields, the birds were hushed upon the branches, quiet and darkness took and refreshed the world. Only the throbbing music of the stream beat upon the ears, and beat with a louder significance, since all else was still. Sylvia lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness. To the murmur of this music, in perhaps this very room, she had been born. ”Why,” she asked piteously, ”why?” Of what use was it that she must suffer?

Of all the bad hours of her life, these were the worst. For the yearning for happiness and love throbbed and cried at her heart, louder and louder, just as the music of the stream swelled to importance with the coming of the night. And she learned that she had had both love and happiness within her grasp and that she had thrown them away for a shadow. She thought of the letter which she had written, recalling its phrases with a sinking heart.

”No man could forgive them. I must have been mad,” she said, and she huddled herself upon her bed and wept aloud.

She ran over in her mind the conversations which she and Hilary Chayne had exchanged, and each recollection accused her of impatience and paid a tribute to his gentleness. On the very first day he had asked her to go with him and her heart cried out now:

”Why didn't I go?”

He had been faithful and loyal ever since, and she had called his faithfulness importunity and his loyalty a humiliation. She struck a match and looked at her watch and by habit wound it up. And she drearily wondered on how many, many nights she would have to wind it up and speculate in ignorance what he, her lover, was doing and in what corner of the world, before the end of her days was reached. What would become of her? she asked. And she raised the corner of a curtain and glanced at the bright picture of what might have been. And glancing at it, the demand for happiness raised her in revolt.

She lit her candle and wrote another letter, of the shortest. It contained but these few words: