The Duchess of Wrexe Part 57

She looked at him. Roddy was in real trouble. His very physical strength showed the more clearly that he was unhappy. His fingers moved restlessly, his eyes were never still. She looked at her letters. There was one from Lady Adela.

"Oh! I'm sorry--I'm afraid I shall have to go back almost immediately--The d.u.c.h.ess is much less well--They're worried about her."

"The d.u.c.h.ess!" Roddy started up and then sat down again. "I'm sorry--I was thinking about her only yesterday. What's the matter?"

"Lady Adela doesn't say, but she asks about you--the d.u.c.h.ess, I mean.

Got it into her head, Lady Adela says, that you're not well or something."

"I'll write to her." Roddy spoke slowly as though to himself--"I've not treated her very well lately and she's always been such a brick to me."

He left his breakfast, walked backwards and forwards once or twice--"Always been such a brick to me, the old lady has," he repeated.

Lady Adela really did want Lizzie to return. This horrid war was getting on her nerves, the house was all in disorder and n.o.body seemed either well or happy.

"Somebody really does want me," thought Lizzie with a certain grim satisfaction.

But she was terribly restless that morning. She could settle down to nothing and ended by walking up and down the garden paths, watching the pale winter light cross the Downs in sweeping shadow, seeing the bare branches, all black and sharp against the blue distance.

How she loved life and how, at every turn, life was thrust from her! For that other woman, there inside the house, two men were ready, eager to die--for herself, in all the world, no one cared.

There came up to her again, borne as it were on the sharp winter air, a determination to drive down Rachel's defences. The very sense that now, after Lady Adela's letter, she must shortly return to London, hardened her resolution.

Before breakfast she had felt that she did not care, now, quite suddenly she was determined that she would confront Rachel and drag the truth from her. How much did Rachel care? Was Rachel already involved in a liaison with Breton?

And, at that thought, a pain so fierce clutched her heart that for a moment she could not see and the garden and the sky mingled like coloured smoke before her eyes.

Suddenly, coming to the end of the garden by the stone gate she saw that a strange thing had happened--one of the gryphons, perched there for many centuries, had tumbled to the ground and lay in the path, beyond the garden, broken into two pieces.

The storm of last night must have driven it down. But what had broken it?

She was sorry. She knew how deeply attached Roddy was to those gryphons; she remembered his pride when he had pointed them out to her.

The other gryphon looked very lonely.

"He _will_ be distressed." The dead leaves on the path were trembling over the broken pieces of stone and whistling, in little excited groups, above it--"Just as though they are glad," she thought.

She and Rachel had a very amiable conversation at luncheon. Rachel confessed to a bad night.

Lizzie told her about Jacob.

"How tiresome of him to come and bother you--yes, I couldn't sleep and he was very restless too, so I put him into the pa.s.sage. It was after six--I meant him to go down to the servants' hall. I'm so sorry, Miss Rand."

"Oh, he didn't worry me at all. I _was_ awake." That appeal was in Rachel's eyes to-day more than ever. Lizzie saw it and steeled her heart. "I must know," she thought. "I _must_ know."

"I'm afraid," she said, "that I'll have to go back to London to-morrow.

I heard from Lady Adela this morning--The d.u.c.h.ess is not so well."

"Oh!" Rachel caught her breath--"oh, Miss Rand, no, no, oh! I hope not!

You _must_ stay! I----!" her colour came and went. "There's the dance. I don't know what I shall do without you." And she went on more desperately, catching Lizzie's eyes and evading them. "We are just beginning to be so happy here. My husband likes you so much. I do hope----"

She stopped and the colour left her again; her hands were trembling on the white tablecloth.

The strangest impulse flooded Lizzie's breast, an impulse to go to her and put her arms about her and kiss her and let her, there and then, unburden her heart--

Lizzie drove the impulse down, buried it. Her eyes were cold and her voice hard as she answered--

"I'm so sorry, but I think I _must_ go. I can't leave Lady Adela if things are really difficult. I'll come this afternoon, shall I? and we might go over the dance----"

Rachel had been thinking; she looked up sharply and stared at Lizzie, staring as though she had been some stranger whom she saw for the first time.

"Yes--Come to the Chinese room at four, will you? We'll have tea up there."

"Yes," said Lizzie, "at four."

They were both of them aware that something, now quite irrevocable, had been settled by these words.

There was a little old library up in one of the towers, and there Lizzie went. She had a desperate need of some place where, during the next hour, she might think and decide upon some plan. The room had little diamond-paned windows that looked down, on one side, over the courtyard, and on the other over the garden and the Downs. The shelves went from ceiling to floor and were filled with books that dimly shone with their old gold and were dusky in their rich, faded bindings.

It was very seldom that anyone came here; Lizzie was quite alone as, perched up in one of the deep-seated windows, she looked down at the garden, saw the stone gate with the solitary gryphon, watched the swiftly fading afternoon light fill the green lawn as a pot is filled with water.

Even now, early though it was, the little room was growing dark.

She strove now, resolutely, to discipline her mind. Although the very thought of Francis Breton now shamed her, it was for him that she must care. "Poor dear," he was even now, in her heart. "Foolish, indiscreet--must plunge from one mess into another, needs someone--Oh, so dreadfully--to help him out."

Her hostility to Rachel did not prevent her from feeling that here was someone very young, terribly inexperienced, most unhappily impulsive--the very last in the world to prevent Breton from having another catastrophe as bad as the early ones.

She must know absolutely what it was that he and Rachel were doing, and only Rachel could tell her that--And here her feeling about Rachel was compounded of the strangest mixture of anger and suspicion, of tenderness and compa.s.sion, of sympathy and hard callous indifference.

"Oh!" Lizzie thought, "why has all this come to me? Why wasn't I allowed just to go on with my life as it was--My life that was so safe and sure and dull?"--

She was conscious, as she sat there, that she was listening for something. She felt, in an odd way, that the day had been a direct continuance of the dream that she had had in the night; all the morning she had been aware that her ears, in spite of herself, had been waiting for some sound, a message, or an arrival.

She sat now in the swiftly darkening room, as though she had been told that someone was coming at such and such an hour and she had heard the clock strike and was listening for the grating of the wheels on the cobbles of the courtyard.

The calm winter's day pa.s.sed now into a purple twilight--lights were coming in the windows--

She thought she heard a step in the pa.s.sage and was startled as though someone had been suddenly, unexpectedly within the room.

She opened the window and listened--"Someone--several people--will come down that garden path in a minute--I know they will."

But the air was very cold and she closed the window; even as she did so a clock struck four.

She got up and went to Rachel.

III

The Chinese room was so called because its walls were covered with a stiff golden Chinese paper. It had wide windows looking on to the garden; Rachel used it a great deal.

Lizzie fixed upon her mind, very deliberately, all the details of her surroundings. Rachel was dressed in black with red round her throat and her waist, and this brilliant colour made her face seem white and there were deep, heavy black marks under her eyes.