Mrs. Tams came in, already perfectly transformed from a mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother into a parlour-maid with no human tie.

"Good-afternoon, Mrs. Tams."

"So ye've got back, ma'am!"

While Mrs. Tams laid the table, with many grunts and creakings of the solid iron in her stays, Rachel sat on a chair by the fire, trying to seem in a casual, dreamy mood, cogitating upon what she must say.

"Will mester be down for tea, ma'am?" asked Mrs. Tams, who had excusably a.s.sumed that Louis was upstairs.

And Rachel, forced now to defend, instead of attacking, blurted out--

"Oh! By the way, I was forgetting; Mr. Fores will not be in for tea."

Mrs. Tams, forgetting she was a parlour-maid, vociferated in amazement and protest--

"Not be in for tea, ma'am? And him as he is!" All her lately gathering suspicions were strengthened and multiplied.

Rachel had to continue as she had begun: "He's been called away on very urgent business. He simply had to go."

Mrs. Tams, intermitting her duties, stood still and gazed at Rachel.

"Was it far, ma'am, as he had for to go?"

A simple question, and yet how difficult to answer plausibly!

"Yes--rather."

"I suppose he'll be back to-night, ma'am?"

"Oh yes, of course!" replied Rachel, in absurd haste. "But if he isn't, I'm not to worry, he said. But he fully expects to be. We scarcely had time to talk, you see. He was getting ready when I came in."

"A telegram, ma'am, I suppose it was?"

"Yes.... That is, I don't know whether there was a telegram first, or not. But he was called for, you see. A cab. I couldn't have let him go off walking, not as he is."

Mrs. Tarns gave a gesture.

"I suppose I mun alter this 'ere table, then," said she, putting a cup and saucer back on the tray.

"Idiot! Idiot!" Rachel described herself to herself, when Mrs.

Tams, very much troubled, had left the room. "'By the way, I was forgetting'--couldn't I have told her better than that? She's known for a week that there's been something wrong, and now she's certainly guessed there's something dreadfully wrong.... Just look at all the silly lies I've told already! What will it be like to-morrow--and Monday? I wonder what my face looked like while I was telling her!"

She rushed upstairs to discover what luggage Louis had taken with him.

But apparently he had taken nothing whatever. The trunk, the valise, and the various bags were all stacked in the empty attic, exactly as she had placed them. He must have gone off in a moment, without any reflection or preparation.

And when Mrs. Tams served the solitary tea, Rachel was just as idiotic as before.

"By the way, Mrs. Tams," she began again, "did you happen to tell Mr.

Fores where I'd gone this afternoon?... You see, we'd no opportunity to discuss anything," she added, striving once more after verisimilitude.

"Yes'm. I told him when I took him his early cup o' tea."

"Did he ask you?"

"Now ye puzzle me, ma'am! I couldn't swear to it to save my life. But I told him."

"What did he say?" Rachel tried to smile.

"He didna say aught."

Rachel remained alone, to objurgate Rachel. It was indeed only too obvious from Mrs. Tams's constrained and fussy demeanour that the old woman had divined the existence of serious trouble in the Fores household.

III

Some time after the empty ceremony of tea, Rachel sat in state in the parlour, dignified, self-controlled, pretending to sew, as she had pretended to eat and drink and, afterwards, to have an important enterprise of cla.s.sifying and rearranging her possessions in the wardrobe upstairs. Let Mrs. Tams enter ever so unexpectedly, Rachel was a fit spectacle for her, with a new work-basket by her side on the table, and her feet primly on a footstool, quite in the style of the late Mrs. Maldon, and a serious and sagacious look on her face that the fire and the gas combined to illuminate. She did not actually sew, but the threaded needle was ready in her hand to move convincingly at a second's notice, for Mrs. Tams was of a restless and inquisitive disposition that night.

Apparently secure between the drawn blinds, the fire, the Chesterfield, and the sideboard, Rachel was nevertheless ranging wide among vast, desolate tracts of experience, and she was making singular discoveries. For example, it was not until she was alone in the parlour after tea that she discovered that during the whole of her interview with Julian Maldon in the afternoon she had never regarded him as a thief. And yet he was a thief--just as much as Louis! She had simply forgotten that he was a thief. He did not seem to be any the worse for being a thief. If he had shown the desire to explain to her by word of mouth the entire psychology of his theft, she would have listened with patience and sympathy; she would have encouraged him to rect.i.tude. And yet Julian had no claim on her; he was not her husband; she did not love him. But because Louis was her husband, and had a claim on her, and had received all the proofs of her affection--therefore, she must be merciless for Louis! She perceived the inconsistency; she perceived it with painful clearness. She had the impartial logic of the self-accuser. At intervals the self-accuser was flagellated and put to flight by pa.s.sionate reaction, but only to return stealthily and irresistibly....

She had been wrong to take the four hundred and fifty pounds without a word. True, Louis had somewhat casually authorized her to return half of the sum to Julian, but the half was not the whole. And in any case she ought to have told Louis of her project. There could be no doubt that, immediately upon Mrs. Tams's going out, Louis had looked for the four hundred and fifty pounds, and, in swift resentment at its disappearance, had determined to disappear also. He had been stung and stung again, past bearing (she argued) daily and hourly throughout the week, and the disappearance of the money had put an end to his patience. Such was the upshot, and she had brought it about!

She had imagined that she was waiting for destiny, but in fact she had been making destiny all the time, with her steely glances at Louis and her acrid, uncompromising tongue!... And did those other men really admire her? How, for instance, could Thomas Batchgrew admire her, seeing that he had suspected her of lies and concealment about the robbery? If it was on account of supposed lies and concealment that he admired her, then she rejected Thomas Batchgrew's admiration....

The self-accuser and the self-depreciator in her grew so strong that Louis' conduct soon became unexceptionable--save for a minor point concerning a theft of some five hundred pounds odd from an old lady.

And as for herself, she, Rachel, was an over-righteous prig, an interfering person, a blundering fool of a woman, a cruel-hearted creature. And Louis was just a poor, polite martyr who had had the misfortune to pick up certain bank-notes that were not his.

Then the tide of judgment would sweep back, and Rachel was the innocent, righteous martyr again, and Louis the villain. But not for long.

She cried pa.s.sionately within her brain: "I must have him. I must get hold of him. I _must_!"

But when the brief fury of longing was exhausted she would ask: "How can I get hold of him? Where is he?" Then more forcibly: "What am I to do first? Yes, what ought I to do? What is wisest? He little guesses that he is killing me. If he had guessed, he wouldn't have done it.

But nothing will kill me! I am as strong as a horse. I shall live for ages. There's the worst of it all!... And it's no use asking what I ought to do, either, because nothing, nothing, nothing would induce me to run after him, even if I knew where to run to! I would die first. I would live for a hundred years in torture first. That's positive."

The hands of the clock, instead of moving slowly, seemed to progress at a prodigious rate. Mrs. Tams came in--

"Shall I lay mester's supper, ma'am?"

The idea of laying supper for the master had naturally not occurred to Rachel.

"Yes, please."

When the supper was laid upon one half of the table, the sight of it almost persuaded Rachel that Louis would be bound to come--as though the waiting supper must mysteriously magnetize him out of the world beyond into the intimacy of the parlour.

And she thought, as she strove for the hundredth time to recall the phrases of the letter--

"'Perfectly satisfactory explanation!' suppose he _has_ got a perfectly satisfactory explanation! He must have. He must have. If only he has, everything would be all right. I'd apologize. I'd almost go on my knees to him.... And he was so ill all the time, too!... But he's gone. It's too late now for the explanation. Still, as soon as I hear from him, I shall write and ask him for it."