Part 26 (2/2)

But before she could see it she must with her cold, quick fingers remove the fragment of stained paper that lay upon it like a veil. The half of a page of Moliere--turned down--like that famous page of Sh.e.l.ley's ”Sophocles”--and stained with sea water, as that was stained.

She raised the picture to her lips and kissed it--not with pa.s.sion--but clingingly, as though it represented her only wealth, amid so much poverty. Then her hand, holding it, dropped to her knee again; the other hand came to close over it; and her eyes shut. Tears came slowly through the lashes.

Amazing!--that that woman should have come back--and died--within a few hundred yards, and she, Alice, know nothing! In spite of all Richard's persuasions she tortured herself anew with the thought of the interview between Judith and Mr. Barron. What could they have talked about--so long? Judith was always an excitable, hot-tempered creature. Her silence had been heavily and efficiently bought for fifteen years. Then steps had been taken--insisted upon--by Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton. His wife and his sister-in-law had opposed him in vain. And Ralph had after all triumphed in Judith's apparent acquiescence.

Supposing she had now come home, perhaps on a sudden impulse, with a view to further blackmail, would not her wisest move be to risk some indiscretion, some partial disclosure, so that her renewed silence afterward might have the higher price? An hour's _tete-a-tete_ with that shrewd, hard-souled man, Henry Barron! Alice Puttenham guessed that her own long-established dislike of him as acquaintance and neighbour was probably returned with interest; that he cla.s.sed her now as one of ”Meynell's lot,” and would be only too glad to find himself possessed of any secret information that might, through her, annoy and hara.s.s Richard Meynell, her friend and counsellor.

Was it conceivable that nothing should have been said in that lengthy interview as to the causes for Judith's coming home?--or of the reasons for her original departure? What else could have accounted for so prolonged a conversation between two persons, so different in social grade, and absolute strangers to each other?

Richard had told her, indeed, and she saw from the _Post_, that at the inquest Barron had apparently accounted for the conversation. ”She gave me a curious history of her life in the States. I was interested by her strange personality--and touched by her physical condition.”

Richard was convinced that there was no reasonable cause for alarm. But Richard was always the consoler--the optimist--where she was concerned.

Could she have lived at all--if it had not been so?

And then, for the second time, the rush of feeling rose, welling up, not from the springs of the past, but from the deepest sources of the present.

_Richard!_

That little villa on the Cap Martin--the steep pathway to it--and Richard mounting it, with that pale look, those tattered, sea-stained leaves in his hand--and the tragedy that had to be told, in his eyes, and on his lips. Could any other human being have upheld her as he did through that first year--through the years after? Was it not to him that she owed everything that had been recovered from the wreck; the independence and freedom of her daily life; protection from her hard brother-in-law, and from her sister's reproaches; occupation--hope--the gradual healing of intolerable wounds--the gradual awakening of a spiritual being?

Thus--after pa.s.sion--she had known friends.h.i.+p; its tenderness, its disinterested affection and care.

_Tenderness?_ Her hand dashed away some more impetuous tears, then locked itself in the other, the tension of the muscles answering to the inward effort for self-control. Thank G.o.d, she had never asked him for more; had often seemed indeed to ask him for much less; had made herself irresponsive, difficult, remote. At least she had never lost her dignity in his eyes--(ah! in whose eyes but his had she ever possessed it?)--she had never forfeited--never risked even--her sacred place in his life, as the soul he had helped through dark places, true servant as he was of the Master of Pity.

The alarms of the week died away, as this emotion gained upon her. She bethought her of certain central and critical years, when, after long dependence on him as comrade and friend, suddenly, she knew not how, her own pulse had quickened, and the sharpest struggle of her life had come upon her. It was the crisis of the mature woman, as compared with that of the innocent and ignorant girl; and in the silent mastering of it she seemed to have parted with her youth.

But she had never parted with self-control and self-respect. She had never persuaded herself that the false was true. She had kept her counsel, and her sanity, and the wage of it had not been denied her. She had emerged more worthy of his friends.h.i.+p, more capable of rewarding it.

Yes, but with a clear and sad perception of the necessities laid upon her--of the sacrifices involved.

He believed her--she knew it--indifferent to the great cause of religious change and reform which he had at heart. In these matters, indeed, she had quietly, unwaveringly held aloof. There are efforts and endurances that can only be maintained--up to a point. Beyond that point resistance breaks. The life that is fighting emotion must not run too many risks of emotion. At the root of half the religious movements of the world lies the appeal of the preacher and the prophet--to women. Because women are the creatures and channels of feeling; and feeling is to religion as air to life.

But _she_--must starve feeling--not feed and cherish it. Richard's voice was too powerful with her already. To hear it dealing with the most intimate and touching things of the soul would have tested the resistance of her will too sorely. Courage and honour alike told her that she would be defeated and undone did she attempt to meet and follow him--openly--in the paths of religion. _Entbehren sollst du_--_sollst entbehren!_

So, long before this date, she had chosen her line of action. She took no part in the movement, and she rarely set foot in the village church, which was close to her gates. Meynell sadly believed her unshakeable--one of the natural agnostics or pessimists of the world who cannot be comforted through religion.

And meanwhile secretly, ardently, she tracked all the footsteps of his thoughts, reading what he read, thinking as far as possible what he thought, and revealing nothing.

Except that, lately, she had been indiscreet sometimes in talk with Mary Elsmere. Mary had divined her--had expressed her astonishment that her friend should declare herself and her sympathies so little; and Alice had set up some sort of halting explanation.

But in this nascent friends.h.i.+p it was not Mary alone who had made discoveries....

Alice Puttenham sat very still, in the quiet shadowy room, her eyes closed, her hands crossed over the miniature, the Markborough paper lying on the floor beside her. As the first activity of memory, stirred and goaded by an untoward event, lost its poignancy; as she tried in obedience to Meynell to put away her terrors, with regard to the past, her thoughts converged ever more intensely on the present--on herself-- and Mary....

<script>