The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 31

He set out at once. Heretofore, with the exception of Terry, women had meant little to him. But he was curious to meet this woman--curious and eager in a strangely boyish fashion. Every one who had mentioned her had spoken of her with a certain hint of fear, not untinged with adoration.

He hadn't been aware how anxious he had been to meet her until her note had summoned him. He wondered whether she had any of the endearing humanity of her sister. He wondered whether what Pollock had said was true, that she looked much older than her portrait. He didn't want her to look older----

He came to the bridge across the moat and the gateway which bore the grooves in which the old portcullis used to slide. He pa.s.sed through the gateway, under the tower, into the graveled courtyard of the Castle. On three sides the courtyard was loop-holed and sullen, but on the fourth modern windows and a bra.s.s-k.n.o.bbed door had been let into the solid masonry. Above the door, shining down on the whitened steps, a lamp burnt in a wrought-iron socket. Several of the windows were also lighted.

His knock was answered by a gray-haired man, with the gravity of deportment which is peculiar to lawyers, undertakers and footmen. While the man went to inform his mistress, Tabs was left to note how the hall was hung with hunting trophies. Then he heard himself being requested to follow.

Having climbed a winding stair, he was shown into a room in the turret, one side of which was filled by a tall leaded window gazing westward.

The landscape which it framed, hung against the darkness like a painted canvas--a far-reaching expanse of tree-dotted pasture, vague with islands of mist and rimmed by the last faint sparks of the sunset. The ceiling was heavily beamed, the furniture Jacobean, the walls paneled and hung with many generations of family portraits. In a wide hearth a fire of coals and logs was burning. In the room's center stood a carved table on which was set a ma.s.sive silver lamp, casting a solitary illumination.

"Lord Taborley, my Lady."

As his name was announced, he heard the rustle of her dress, and discovered that she had been seated in a low chair by the window. She rose with a slow grace. There was something indefinably tragic and foreordained about her every movement. Maisie's name for her flashed into his mind, "The Princess Czarina Bolsheviki." It suited her exactly.

In those surroundings she might have posed as Mary Queen of Scots in prison--a queen without a kingdom whose pride was unbroken. In the dimness his first impression was of her queenly gentleness.

"I can guess why you've come."

The same deep voice that had taunted him at Maisie's, only now it was no longer taunting! He noticed the way she offered him her hand, with the arm fully extended as if to hold him away from her. She was a smaller woman than he had remembered; it was the courage of her bearing that had made her seem taller. He could not see her face distinctly; it was in shadow. But, when she turned, he caught the whiteness of her profile on the dusk, clear-cut and tranquil as a cameo. After having gazed so long at Sargent's painting, he would have recognized anywhere the rounded shapeliness of her head, the hair swept smoothly back from the calm forehead, the splendid strength of her throat and the delicate, wholly feminine half-moon of her shoulders.

"Won't you sit over here? If you would prefer it, we can have more lamps. But they would spoil----" She indicated the vague stretch of country, across which mists were drifting like gray ghosts.

He drew up a chair at an angle to her own, so that he could study her.

"You say you think you know why I've come?"

"I was expecting you," she said quietly. He could feel rather than see the steady kindness that was in her stone-gray eyes.

"If you were expecting me, then your sister must have----"

"My sister had nothing to do with my expecting. Can't you think of any one closer?"

He shook his head. At first he had hoped that Maisie had told her and done his work for him. Evidently it wasn't that. She was attributing some other motive to his visit. It was a motive the disclosure of which called for delicacy. She had prearranged his reception. It was no accident that had caused him to find her alone in the dimness of the gathering evening. The scanty lighting of the shadowy room had been stage-set to spare them both embarra.s.sment. "If it wasn't your sister----" He paused at a loss to know how to proceed further.

Her hands came together gently in her lap. When she spoke, her emotional voice had a new tenderness. "Will you allow me to help you? We're not such strangers as we seem. For years I've been interested in you. I was always hearing of your adventures in Mexico, Korea, the Balkans and last of all at the Front. You've been quite a romantic figure in my life.

You've always seemed so strong; and I admire strength immensely. I never dreamt that a time would ever come when I would be able to help you.

You're in love and she's not in love with you. You're older than she is and it makes you unhappy. She has time to experiment, but for you it's different; your love is bound up with the last of your youth. Because you've been unhappy, you've been unwise. Your foolishness ended yesterday with the return of Reggie Pollock. I received the news of his return this morning. So you came down here to me, which was perfectly natural."

He shifted his gaze and stared out of the window, puzzled and troubled.

"Unfortunately for me, Lady Dawn, a good deal of what you've said is true. But I don't see how it makes it natural that I should have come to you. I've been wanting to come for a very long time, but was given to understand that what I had to say might be distasteful."

"You must put that out of your mind." She said it comfortingly, as though to a little boy. "There's nothing distasteful in what you have to say. It may cause awkwardness with Sir Tobias; but if you can a.s.sure me that you're really in earnest over Terry, I'll be quite willing to risk that in order to become your ally."

He smiled towards her through the darkness. "There's nothing I should like better than to reckon you as my ally. And now I see why we've been talking at cross-purposes. You think that I've come to wheedle Terry's address out of you. Perhaps I have, since you've put the idea into my head. And with regard to my earnestness, nothing except Terry in the whole world matters. She's romance, self-fulfillment and, as you've said, the last dream of my youth. If I supposed that I were going to lose her, I would rather not have---- But I didn't come here to burden you with my troubles. I came to do something for you--something which I've tried to avoid doing. Something which has forced itself upon me and followed me until---- It's as though I'd been compelled by a personality outside myself. I may make you very unhappy----"

She leant forward, bringing her face so close that he could feel the fanning of her breath. The moon was newly risen; as it shone on the mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges.

In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had never seen such calmness. And the calmness was not alone in her expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that her sympathy could not encompa.s.s--nothing that he need be ashamed to tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was filled with a strange sense of grat.i.tude.

Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.

"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one--not even you--has the power to do that."

VIII

He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."

A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth?

You yourself tell the truth---- When they say that I never cry, they mean that I never let them see me."

He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man.

Not to cry at all would be monstrous; it was that which made me afraid of you. A man doesn't like a woman to be stronger than himself. It was about a man who didn't like a woman to be stronger than himself that I came to talk to you."

She had guessed. Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the night without.

Her lips scarcely moved. "And the man?"

"Your husband."

"But he's dead."

"I know."

He waited for her to flame up at the indelicacy of his intrusion. He almost hoped she would. When she sat motionless as a statue, he continued apologetically. "I'm trespa.s.sing on things sacred. Because of that I've fought to avoid this meeting, knowing all the time that it was inevitable. I've tried to persuade myself that it would be kinder to leave you in ignorance----"

"Of what?" She strove to subdue her apprehension. Her profile showed pale and expressionless, as if chiseled in the solid wall of darkness.

"In ignorance of his grandeur."

He had said the thing most remote from what she had expected. He was aware of her relieved suspense--at the same time of her gentle skepticism. He felt irritated with himself at his choice of words.

Grandeur did not express the meaning he had intended. When he made a new start, he stumbled his way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of her unuttered doubts.

"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake.

It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a sleep-walker--a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you--to you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging----"

"Who I _was_!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display of interest.

"I mean your relation to him--that it was you who were his wife. At the Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his ident.i.ty. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us--something to be sent over the top to be smashed and then to be left to sink into the mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much now--only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry and base once; but he was reborn into a new n.o.bility. He was white all through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all adored him--adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful when there was dying to be done--out at rest and in quiet sectors he was gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him--one does in the presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we, who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold--his untiring ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn who was born out there. It was last night, after Pollock returned, that I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and ridicule----"

He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him.

He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes, glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though his lips had been used----

"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly.

"He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things?

Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."

"They're only part of the reasons."

"There are others?"

"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he might lose her attention by rousing her incredulity. Even to himself it sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and officers knew you, without knowing who you were. You were with us in the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's portraits from the ill.u.s.trated papers and treasure them. As we sit here it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic.

Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss----"