The Arbiter Part 31

And she looked as if something else that she did not say were on the tip of her tongue.

"It must have been delightful in the woods to-day," said Pateley, hardly knowing what he answered. He also was preoccupied by the story he had heard and wondering how much she knew of it. "Are you going home now?"

he said, as Rachel turned away from the promenade in the direction she had pointed out.

"I think so. I am a little tired," said Rachel, holding out her hand.

"May I come and see you?" Pateley said.

"Please do," said Rachel.

"I certainly shall," Pateley said. "It will be delightful to get away for a little while from this seething ma.s.s of humanity."

And he again gave one of his loud laughs as he also went towards the tent, to plunge with the greatest zest into the seething ma.s.s whose company he had been contemning.

CHAPTER XXIV

Rachel turned in the other direction and walked slowly back to the pavilion. What had happened? What had she been hearing? The slightest mental exertion still made her head ache, but she was conscious that if she once let herself go and made the effort it would be possible for her to understand. But that moment had not come yet.

She had not been many minutes in her quiet shady garden when the little gate at the bottom of it was thrown open, and her husband came quickly in, looking round him with an anxious, hurried glance as though not knowing what he might find. What had he expected? He could hardly have told. But as he drew nearer and nearer he had been gradually nerving himself for the worst. He had been dreading to find he knew not what.

Wentworth might be sitting with Rachel, the faces of both telling that Wentworth's would-be explanations had been of no avail; or Rachel herself might have been absent--she might have strolled out into the crowd and there unawares heard rumours of what he felt convinced must by this time be in every one's mind, on every one's lips. It was therefore for the moment an unmeasured relief to find that all seemed as usual, that Rachel was sitting there quiet and cool before her little tea-table.

"Ah!" he almost gasped, with a long sigh, as he sank into a chair and leant his head against the back of it with a weary, hunted look.

"Frank!" said Rachel anxiously, "what is the matter? What has happened?"

"What do you mean?" he said, sitting up, with again the startled, haggard expression on his face. "What should have happened?"

"I don't know," Rachel said, startled too at his look and manner. "You look so tired, so ill."

"Oh, I'm all right," he said, taking up and drinking eagerly the cup of tea that almost mechanically she had poured out and pushed towards him, and as he did so he realised that he had had no food since the morning.

He ate and drank and then again lay back in his chair and was silent. As Rachel looked at him the absolute conviction swept over her--she knew not why--that he had been concerned in the terrible catastrophe of which she had heard the broken accounts. It began to dawn upon her that in some inconceivable way the thing had happened to him; that it was of him those women were speaking. She still heard Lady Adela saying: "Did you ever see any one look so awful?" And yet what could it be? What horrible misunderstanding was it? What horrible mistake could have been made?

She sat and waited. Not the least of her charms was that she knew, what many women do not know, how to sit absolutely quiet. She knew when to refrain from questioning, how to sit by her companion in so peaceful, so final a manner, as it were, that he did not feel that she was simply waiting for what he would do next.

The band blared out again with renewed vigour. Rendel leant his elbows on his knees, his face between his hands.

"Oh! that miserable noise!" he said. "Will it never leave off? The hideousness of it all!--those people, that band! Oh! to get away from it all!" he muttered half to himself.

"Frank," said Rachel entreatingly, touching his arm, "if you don't like it why shouldn't we go away from it? I think it is horrible, too. I went out of the garden to-day to where the people were walking."

Rendel looked up quickly.

"Did you? Did you see any one you knew?"

"Yes," said Rachel; "I saw Mr. Pateley."

"Pateley!" said her husband. "Did you have any talk with him? What did he say?"

"Hardly anything," said Rachel. "He was surprised to see me, and asked how long we had been here, and if he might come and see us. That was all."

"That was all," echoed Rendel, again with an inward s.h.i.+ver. "Coming to see us, is he?"

That encounter for the moment he must at any cost avoid.

"Frank, I wonder if we must go on staying here?" Rachel said.

"Of course we must," Rendel replied, trying to pull himself together again. "Dr. Morgan said that this was the very best place for you to come to, and that the waters would do you all the good in the world."

"I wonder if we need," said Rachel. "I am sure it is the kind of thing you hate."

"It is not for very long, after all," said Rendel, trying to smile.

He was gradually regaining possession of himself, but was still afraid to trust himself to utter any but the most commonplace and ordinary sentences.

"The moment I have done the cure," said Rachel, "we'll go back to London, won't we? And you can begin your work again, and do all the things you like. And then," she went on with an attempt at lightness of tone, "you can go back to your beloved politics, and think of nothing else all day." And she went on talking of their house, of their arrival, of what they would do, in a forlorn little attempt to show him that she meant to try to shoulder life valiantly, although it had been so altered. "You will stand for somewhere. You will go into the House."

Rendel thought of what the life might have been that she was sketching, and what it was going to be now. What he had gone through that day was an earnest probably of what awaited him many a time if he should try to lead his life as he used to lead it, among the people who were congenial to him.

"No," he said, "I'm not going to stand. I'm not going into the House. I shan't have anything to do with politics."

"What?" said Rachel, looking at him startled.

"All that, is at an end," he said firmly. Then with the relief of speaking, came the irresistible desire to go on, to tell her something at least of what his fate was, although he might not tell the thing that mattered most.

"Do you remember," he said, "something that I told you had happened----"

he broke off, then began again. "Tell me," he said, impelled to ask, "how much you remember, if you remember anything, of those days when your father was so ill, at the end, just before he died, or is it still a blank to you?"

Rachel shuddered.

"No, I can't remember," she said. "The last thing I remember clearly is one afternoon when he was beginning to be worse and had to go upstairs again; and I remember nothing more after that till," and her voice trembled, "till--a day that I woke up in bed and wanted to go to him, and you told me that--that he was dead. The rest of that time is a blank."

"How extraordinary it is!" muttered Rendel to himself.

"I did not even know," said Rachel, "that I had fallen on the stairs, until the doctor told me days afterwards that I had caught my foot as I was running downstairs. He told me then it was no use trying to remember the time just before," she went on in a low, anxious voice, something stirring uneasily within her: "that it might not come back at all. It seems it doesn't sometimes to people who have that sort of accident."

Rendel, his eyes fixed on the ground, had been listening; he took in the meaning of her words and tried to realise their bearing on himself, but he was too far gone on the slope to stop. It was clear that she would not know what had happened, unless she were told by himself... and yet, who could tell how the awakening would come? it might even be in a worse form when she was able once more to mix with her kind.

"Rachel," he said. "I want to tell you something that happened the day before your father became worse, the day before you had that accident, the last day, in fact, that you remember." She looked at him with anxious eagerness. "Something tremendously important happened. Lord Stamfordham brought me some private notes of his own to decipher and copy."

"Of course," said Rachel, "that I remember. In your study downstairs."

"You remember?" said Rendel eagerly. Then instantly conscious, alas, that the evidence could do him no kind of good, "that I gave some papers to Thacker to take to Stamfordham?"

"Stop a minute," said Rachel. "Yes, I remember that too. My father wanted to play chess afterwards, but he was too tired."