The Four Corners of the World Part 18

For it was at the far end of the room and almost over the front door.

Royle came within view of it at last, and stopped dead. He gazed at the window with amazement. Ina was still sitting at the writing-table in the window, but she was no longer alone. Just where he himself had stood a few minutes before, a step behind her shoulder, another man was now standing--a man with a strong, rather square, dark face, under a mane of black hair. He wore a dinner-jacket and a black tie, and he was bending forward and talking to Ina very earnestly. Ina herself sat with her hands pressed upon her face and her body huddled in her chair, not answering, but beaten down by the earnestness of the stranger's pleading. Thus they appeared within the frame of the window, both extraordinarily distinct to Royle watching outside there in the darkness. He could see the muscles working in the stranger's face and the twitching of Ina's hands, but he could hear nothing. The man was speaking in too low a voice.

Royle did not move.

"But I know the man," he was saying to himself. "I have seen him, at all events. Where? Where?" And suddenly he remembered. It was at the time of a General Election. He had arrived at King's Cross Station from Scotland late one night, and, walking along the Marylebone Road, he had been attracted by a throng of people standing about a lamp-post, and above the throng the head and shoulders of a man addressing it had been thrown into a clear light. He had stopped for a moment to listen; He had asked a question of his neighbour. Yes, the speaker was one of the candidates, and he was the man who now stood by Ina's side.

Royle tried to remember the name, but he could not. Then he began to wonder whence the stranger had come. It was a good two miles to the village. How, too, had he managed to get into the house? The servants had gone to bed an hour before Royle had come out. The hall-door stood open now. He had left it open. The man must have been waiting some such opportunity--as he had done no doubt last night. Such a pa.s.sion of anger and jealousy flamed up in Royle as he had never known. He ran into the hall and shot the bolts. He hurried up the stairs and flung open the door. Ina was still sitting at the table, but she had withdrawn her hands from her face, and, but for her, the room was empty.

"Ina!" he cried, and she turned to him. Her face was quiet, her eyes steady; there was a smile upon her lips.

"Yes?"

She sat just as he had left her. Looking at her in his bewilderment, he almost came to believe that his eyes had tricked him, that thus she had sat all this while. Almost! For the violence of his cry had been unmistakable, and she did not ask for the reason of it. He was out of breath, too, his face no doubt disordered; yet she put no question; she sat and smiled--tenderly. Yes, that was the word. Dorman Royle stood in front of her. It seemed to him that his happiness was crumbling down in ruins about him.

"Ina!" he repeated, and the dog barked for admission underneath the window. The current of his thoughts was altered by the sound. His pa.s.sion fell away from him. It seemed to him that he dived under ice.

"Ina!"

He sat quietly down in the chair on the other side of that table.

"You have had that dog some time?" he asked.

"Yes."

"How did you get it?"

The answer came quite steadily but slowly, and after a long silence.

"A friend gave it to me."

"Who?"

There was no longer any smile upon the girl's face. Nor, on the other hand, was there any fear. Her eyes never for a second wavered from his.

"Why do you ask?"

"I am curious," replied Royle. "Who?"

"Raymond Byatt."

The name conveyed nothing to Royle. He did not even recollect it. But he spoke as if it were quite familiar to him.

"Raymond Byatt? Didn't he stand for Parliament once in Marylebone?"

"Yes. He was defeated."

Royle rose from his chair.

"Well, I had better go down and let the dog in," he said, and he went to the door, where he turned to her again.

"But if he's a friend of yours, you should ask him down," he remarked.

Ina drew herself up in her chair, her hands clinging to the arms of it.

"He killed himself a fortnight ago."

The answer turned Royle into a figure of stone. The two people stared at one another across the room in a dreadful silence; and it seemed as if, having once spoken, Ina was forced by some terrible burden of anguish to speak yet more.

"Yes," she continued in a whisper, "a week before we married."

"Did you care for him?"

Ina shook her head.

"Never."

There were words upon the tip of Royle's tongue--words of bitterness:

"It was he who came back last night. He came back for you. He was with you to-night--the moment after I left you. I saw him." But he knew they would be irrevocable words, and with an effort he held his tongue. He went downstairs and let the dog in. When he returned to the library Ina was standing up.

"I'll go to bed," she said, and her voice pleaded for silence. "I am tired. I have had a long journey;" and he let her go without a word.

He sat late himself, wondering what in the morning he should do. The house had become horrible to him. And unless Ina told him all there was to tell, how could they go on side by side anywhere? When he went upstairs Ina was in bed and asleep. He left the door wide open between her room and his and turned in himself. But he slept lightly, and at some time that night, whilst it was still dark, he was roused to wakefulness. A light was burning in his wife's room, and through the doorway he could see her. She had in her hand the gla.s.s of water which usually stood on a little table beside her bed, and she was measuring out into it from a bottle some crystals. He knew that they were chloral crystals, for, since she slept badly, she always kept them by her. He watched her shaking out the dose, and as he watched such a fear clutched at his heart as made all the other terrors of that night pale and of no account. Ina was measuring out deliberately enough chloral into that tumbler of water to kill a company. Very cautiously he drew himself up in his bed. He heard the girl stifle a sob, and as she waited for the crystals to dissolve her face took on a look of grief and despair which he had never in his life seen before. He sprang out of bed, and in an instant was at her side. With a cry Ina raised the gla.s.s to her lips, but his hand was already upon her wrist.

"Let me go!" she cried, and she struggled to free herself. But he took the gla.s.s from her, and suddenly all her self-command gave way in a pa.s.sion of tears. She became a frightened child. Her hands sought him, she hid her face from him, and she would not let him go.

"Ina," he whispered, "what were you doing?"

"I was following," she said. "I had to. He stands by me, always, commanding me." And she shook like one in a fever.

"Good G.o.d!" he cried.

"Oh, I have fought," she sobbed, "but he's winning. Yes, that's the truth. Sooner or later I shall have to follow."

"Tell me everything," said Royle.

"No."

But he held her close within the comfort of his arms and wrestled for her and for himself. Gradually the story was told to him in broken sentences and with long silences between them, during which she lay in his clasp and shivered.

"He wanted me to marry him. But I wouldn't. He had a sort of power over me--the power of a bully who cares very much," she said; and a little later she gave the strangest glimpse of the man. He would hardly have believed it; but he had seen the man, and the story fitted him.

"I was in Paris for a few days--alone with my maid. I went to see a play which was to be translated for me. He was in the same hotel, quite alone as I was. It was after I had kept on refusing him. He seemed horribly lonely--that was part of his power. I never saw anyone who lived so completely in loneliness. He was shut away in it as if in some prison of gla.s.s through which you could see but not hear. It made him tragic--pitiful. I went up to him in the lounge and asked if we couldn't be just friends, since we were both there alone. You'll never imagine what he did. He stared at me without answering at all. He just walked away and went to the hotel manager. He asked him how it was that he allowed women in his hotel who came up and spoke to strangers."

"Ina--he didn't!" cried Royle.

"He did. Luckily the manager knew me. And that night, though he wouldn't speak to me in the lounge, he wrote me a terrible letter.

Then, when you and I were engaged, he killed himself--just a week before we married. He tried to do it twice. He went down to an hotel at Aylesbury and sat up all night, trying to do it. But the morning came and he had failed. The servant who called him found him sitting in his bedroom at the writing-table at which he had left him the night before; and all night he had written not one word. Next day he went to another hotel on the South Coast, and all that night he waited. But in the morning--after he had been called--quite suddenly he found the courage--yes----" and Ina's voice trailed away into silence. In a little while she began again.

"Ever since he has been at my side, saying 'I did it because of you.