"If there's trouble, dear, will you come to us? We want you to look on our house as a refuge, any hour of the day or night."

Anne stared at her friend. There was something ominous and dismaying in her solemn tenderness, and it roused Anne to wonder, even in her grief.

"You cannot help me, dear," she said. "No one can. Yet I had to come to you and tell you--"

"Tell me everything," said Mrs. Eliott, "if you can."

Anne tried to steady her voice to tell her, and failed. Then f.a.n.n.y had an inspiration. She felt that she must divert Anne's thoughts from the grief that made her dumb, and get her to talk naturally of other things.

"How's Peggy?" said she. She knew it would be good to remind her that, whatever happened, she had still the child.

But at that question, Anne released Mrs. Eliott's hand, and laid her head back upon the cushion and cried.

"Dear," whispered Mrs. Eliott, with her inspiration full upon her, "you will always have _her_."

Then Anne sat up in her corner, and put away her tears, and controlled herself to speak.

"f.a.n.n.y," she said, "Dr. Gardner has seen her. He says I shall not have her very long. Perhaps--a few years--if we take the very greatest care--"

"Oh, my dear! What is it?"

"It's her heart. I thought it was her spine, because of Edie. But it isn't. She has valvular disease. Oh, f.a.n.n.y, I didn't think a little child could have it."

"Nor I," said Mrs. Eliott, shocked into a great calm. "But surely--if you take care--"

"No. He gives no hope. He only says a few years, if we leave Scale and take her into the country. She must never be overtired, never excited. We must never vex her. He says one violent crying fit might kill her. And she cries so easily. She cries sometimes till she's sick."

Mrs. Eliott's face had grown white; she trembled, and was dumb before the anguish of Anne's face.

But it was Anne who rose, and put her arms about the childless woman, and kissed and comforted her.

It was as if she had said: Thank G.o.d you never had one.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

The rumour which was going the round of the clubs in due time reached Lady Cayley through the Ransomes. It roused in her many violent and conflicting emotions.

She sat trembling in the Ransomes' drawing-room. Mrs. Ransome had just asked whether there was anything in it; because if there was, she, Mrs.

Ransome, washed her hands of her. She intimated that it would take a good deal of washing to get Sarah off her hands.

Sarah had unveiled the face of horror, the face of outraged virtue, and the wrath and writhing of propriety wounded in the uncertain, quivering, vital spot. During the unveiling d.i.c.k Ransome had come in. He wanted to know if Topsy had been bullying poor Toodles. Whereupon Topsy wept feebly, and poor Toodles had a moment of monstrous calm.

She wanted to get it quite clear, to make no mistake. They might as well give her the details. Majendie had left his wife, had he? Well, she wasn't surprised at that. The wonder was that, having married her, he had stuck to her so long. He had left his wife, and was living at Scarby, was he, with her? Well, she only wanted to get all the details clear.

At this Sarah fell into a fit of laughter very terrifying to see. Since her own sister wouldn't take her word for it, she supposed she'd have to prove that it was not so.

And, under the horror of her virtue and respectability, there heaved a dull, dumb fury, born of her memory that it once was, her belief that it might have been again, and her knowledge that it was not so. She trembled, shaken by the troubling of the fire that ran underground, the immense, unseen, unliberated, primeval fire. She was no longer a creature of sophistries, hypocrisies, and wiles. She was the large woman of the simple earth, welded by the dark, unspiritual flame.

d.i.c.k Ransome turned on his sister-in-law a pale, puffy face in which two little dark eyes twinkled with a shrewd, gross humour. Nothing could possibly have pleased d.i.c.k Ransome more than an exhibition of indignant virtue, as achieved by Sarah. He knew a great deal more about Sarah than Mrs. Ransome knew, or than Sarah knew herself. To d.i.c.k Ransome's mind, thus illumined by knowledge, that spectacle swept the whole range of human comedy. He sat taking in all the entertainment it presented; and, when it was all over, he remarked quietly that Toodles needn't bother about her proofs. He had got them too. He knew that it was not so. He could tell her that much, but he wasn't going to give Majendie away. No, she couldn't get any more out of him than that.

Sarah smiled. She did not need to get anything more out of him. She had her proof; or, if it didn't exactly amount to proof, she had her clue.

She had found it long ago; and she had followed it up, if not to the end, at any rate, quite far enough. She reflected that Majendie, like the dear fool he always was, had given it to her himself, five years ago.

Men's sins take care of themselves. It is their innocent good deeds that start the hounds of destiny. When Majendie sent Maggie Forrest's handiwork to Mrs. Ransome, with a kind note recommending the little embroideress, by that innocent good deed he woke the sleeping dogs of destiny. Mrs. Ransome's sister had tracked poor Maggie down by the long trail of her beautiful embroidery. She had been baffled when the embroidered clue broke off. Now, after three years, she leaped (and it was not a very difficult leap for Lady Cayley) to the firm conclusion.

Maggie Forrest and her art had disappeared for three years; so, at perilous intervals, had Majendie; therefore they had disappeared together.

Sarah did not like the look in d.i.c.k Ransome's eye. She removed herself from it to the seclusion of her bedroom. There she bathed her heated face with toilette vinegar, steadied her nerves with a cigarette, lay down on a couch and rested, and, pure from pa.s.sion, revised the situation calmly. She was an eminently practical, sensible woman, who knew the facts of life, and knew, also, how to turn them to her own advantage.

Seen by the larger, calmer spirit that was Sarah now, the situation was not as unpleasant as it had at first appeared. To be sure, the rumour in which she had figured was fatal to the matrimonial vision, and to the beautiful illusion of propriety in which she had once lived. But Sarah had renounced the vision; she had abandoned the pursuit of the fugitive propriety. She had long ago seen through the illusion. She might be a deceiver, but she had no power to hoodwink her own indestructible lucidity. Looking back on her life, after the joyous romances of her youth, the years had pa.s.sed like so many funeral processions, each bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial. Then there had come the dreary funeral feast, and then the days of mournful rehabilitation. Oh, that rehabilitation! There had been three years of it. Three years of exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling, and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing. There had been a dubious triumph. Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship, and palpable frustration. After all that, there was something flattering in the thought that, at forty-five, she should yet find her name still coupled with Walter Majendie's in a pa.s.sionate adventure.

It might easily have been, but for Walter's imbecile, suicidal devotion to his wife. He had got nothing out of his marriage. Worse than nothing.

He was the laughing-stock of all his friends who were in the secret; who saw him grovelling at the heels of a disagreeable woman who had made him conspicuous by her aversion. Of course, it might easily have been.

Sarah's imagination (for she had an imagination) drew out all the sweetness that there was for it in that idea. Then it occurred to her sound, prosaic commonsense that a reputation is still a reputation, all the more precious if somewhat precariously acquired; that, though you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, hanging is very poor fun when for years you have seen nothing of sheep or lamb either; that, in short, she must take steps to save her reputation.

The shortest way to save it was the straight way. She would go straight to Mrs. Majendie with her proofs. Her duty to herself justified the somewhat unusual step. And, more than her duty, Sarah loved a scene. She loved to play with other people's emotions and to exhibit her own. She wanted to see how Mrs. Majendie would take it; how the white-faced, high-handed lady would look when she was told that her husband had consoled himself for her high-handedness. She had always been possessed by an ungovernable curiosity with regard to Majendie's wife.

She did not know Majendie's wife, but she knew Majendie. She knew all about the separation and its cause. That was where she had come in. She divined that Mrs. Majendie had never forgiven her husband for his old intimacy with her. It was Mrs. Majendie's jealousy that had driven him out of the house, into the arms of pretty Maggie. Where, she wondered, would Mrs. Majendie's jealousy of pretty Maggie drive him?

Though Sarah knew Majendie, that was more than she would undertake to say. But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered; and the more she wondered, the more she desired to know.

She wondered whether Mrs. Majendie had heard the report. From all she could gather, it was hardly likely. Neither Mrs. Majendie nor her friends mixed in those circles where it went the round. The scandal of the clubs and of the Park would never reach her in the high seclusion of the house in Prior Street.

Into that house Lady Cayley could not hope to penetrate except by guile.

Once admitted, straightforwardness would be her method. She must not attempt to give the faintest social colour to her visit. She must take for granted Mrs. Majendie's view of her impossibility. To be sure Mrs.

Majendie's prejudices were moral even more than social. But moral prejudice could be overcome by cleverness working towards a formidable moral effect.

She would call after six o'clock, an hour incompatible with any social intention. An hour when she would probably find Mrs. Majendie alone.

She rested all afternoon. At five o'clock she fortified herself with strong tea and brandy. Then she made an elaborate and thoughtful toilette.

At forty-five Sarah's face was very large and horribly white. She restored, discreetly, delicately, the vanished rose. The beautiful, flower-like edges of her mouth were blurred. With a thin thread of rouge she retraced the once perfect outline. Wrinkles had drawn in the corners of the indomitable eyes, and ill-health had dulled their blue. That saddest of all changes she repaired by hand-ma.s.sage, pomade, and belladonna. The somewhat unrefined exuberance of her figure she laced in an inimitable corset. Next she arrayed herself in a suit of dark blue cloth, simple and severely reticent; in a white silk blouse, simpler still, sewn with innocent daisies, Maggie's handiwork; in a hat, gay in form, austere in colour; and in gloves of immaculate whiteness.

n.o.body could have possessed a more irreproachable appearance than Lady Cayley when she set out for Prior Street.

At the door she gave neither name nor card. She announced herself as a lady who desired to see Mrs. Majendie for a moment on important business.

Kate wondered a little, and admitted her. Ladies did call sometimes on important business, ladies who approached Mrs. Majendie on missions of charity; and these did not always give their names.

Anne was upstairs in the nursery, superintending the packing of Peggy's little trunk. She was taking her away to-morrow to the seaside, by Dr.

Gardner's orders. She supposed that the nameless lady would be some earnest, beneficent person connected with a case for her Rescue Committee, who might have excellent reasons for not announcing herself by name.

And, at first, coming into the low lit drawing-room, she did not recognise her visitor. She advanced innocently, in her perfect manner, with a charming smile and an appropriate apology.

The smile died with a sudden rigour of repulsion. She paused before seating herself, as an intimation that the occasion was not one that could be trusted to explain itself. Lady Cayley rose to it.