The Unclassed Part 52

She obeyed his summons, and stood up before him; her eyes had fixed themselves upon his; he could not avoid their strange gaze.

"Good-bye," he said.

Her free hand rose to his shoulder, upon which it scarcely rested. He could not escape her eyes, though to meet them tortured him. Her lips were moving, but he could distinguish no syllable; they moved again, and he could just gather the sense of her whisper.

"Do you love me?"

An immense pity thrilled through him. He put his arm about her, held her closely, and pressed his lips against her cheek. She reddened, and hid her face against him. Waymark touched her hair caressingly, then freed his other hand, and went from the room.

Maud sat in thought till a loud ring at the door-bell made her start and flee upstairs. The room in which she and Waymark sat when they were by themselves was in no danger of invasion, but she feared the possibility of meeting her mother to-night. Her father was away from home, as usual, but the days of his return were always uncertain, and Mrs. Enderby might perchance open the door of the little sitting-room just to see whether he was there, as it was here he ordinarily employed himself when in the house. From her bedroom Maud could hear several people ascend the stairs. It was ten o'clock, but an influx of visitors at such an hour was nothing remarkable. She could hear her mother's laugh, and then the voice of a man, a voice she knew but too well--that of Mr. Budge.

Her nerves were excited. The night was close, and there were mutterings of thunder at times; the cloud whence they came seemed to her to spread its doleful blackness over this one roof. An impulse seized her; she took paper and sat down at her desk to write. It was a letter to Waymark, a letter such as she had never addressed to him, and which, even in writing it, she was conscious she could not send. Her hand trembled as she filled the pages with burning words. She panted for more than he had given her; this calm, half-brotherly love of his was just now like a single drop of water to one dying of thirst; she cried to him for a deeper draught of the joy of life. The words came to her without need of thought; tears fell hot from her eyes and blotted what she wrote.

The tears brought her relief; she was able to throw her writing aside, and by degrees to resume that dull, vacant mood of habitual suffering which at all events could be endured. From this, too, there was at times a retreat possible with the help of a book. She had no mind to sleep, and on looking round, she remembered that the book she had been reading in the early part of the day was downstairs. It was after midnight, and she seemed to have a recollection of hearing the visitors leave the house a little while ago; it would be safe to venture as far as the sitting-room below.

She began to descend the stairs quietly. There was still a light in the hall, but the quietness of the house rea.s.sured her. On turning an angle of the stairs, however, she saw that the door of the drawing-room was open, and that just within stood two figures--her mother and Mr. Rudge.

They seemed to be whispering together, and in the same moment their lips met. Then the man came out and went downstairs. Mrs. Enderby turned back into the drawing-room.

Maud stood fixed to the spot. Darkness had closed in around her, and she clung to the banisters to save herself from the gulf which seemed to yawn before her feet. The ringing of a bell, the drawing-room bell summoning Mrs. Enderby's maid, brought her back to consciousness, and with trembling limbs she regained her room. It was as though some ghastly vision of the night had shaken her soul. The habit of her mind overwhelmed her with the conviction that she knew at last the meaning of that mystery of horror which had of late been strengthening its hold upon her imagination. The black cloud which lowered above the house had indeed its significance; the voices which wailed to her of sin and woe were the true expression of things amid which she had been moving unconsciously. That instinct which made her shrink from her mother's presence was not without its justification; the dark powers which circled her existence had not vainly forced their influence upon her.

Her first impulse was to flee from the house; the air breathed pestilence and death, death of the soul. Looking about her in the anguish of conflicting thoughts, her eyes fell upon the pages she had written. These now came before her as a proof of contagion which had seized upon her own nature; she tore the letter hastily into fragments, and, striking fire with a match, consumed them in the grate. As she watched the sparks go out, there came a rustling of dresses past her door. She flung herself upon her knees and sought refuge in wild, wordless prayer.

A fortnight after this Maud went late in the evening to the room where she knew her father was sitting alone. Paul Enderby looked up from his papers in surprise; it was some time since Maud had sought private conversation with him. As he met her pale, resolute face, he knew that she had a serious purpose in thus visiting him, and his look changed to one of nervous antic.i.p.ation.

"Do I disturb you, father?" Maud asked. "Could you spare me a few minutes?"

Paul nodded, and she took a seat near him.

"Father, I am going to leave home, going to be a governess again."

He drew a sigh of relief; he had expected something worse than this.

Yet the relief was only for a moment, and then he looked at her with eyes which made her soul fail for very compa.s.sion.

"You will desert me, Maud?" he asked, trying to convey in his look that which he could not utter in words.

"Father, I can be of no help, and I feel that I must not remain here."

"Have you found a place?"

"This afternoon I engaged myself to go to Paris with a French family.

They have been in England some time, and want to take back an English governess for their children."

Paul was silent.

"I leave the day after to-morrow," she added; at first she had feared to say how soon she was to go.

"You are right," her father said, s.h.i.+fting some papers about with a tremulous hand. "You are right to leave us. You at least will be safe."

"Safe?" she asked, under her breath.

He looked at her in the same despairing way, but said nothing.

"Father," she began, her lips quivering in the intensity of her inward struggle, "can you not go away from here? Can you not take mother away?"

They gazed at each other, each trying to divine what it was that made the other so pale. Did her father know?--Maud asked herself. Did Maud know something more than he himself?--was the doubt in Paul's mind. But they were thinking of different things.

"I can't, I can't!" the wretched man exclaimed, spreading out his arms on the desk. "Perhaps in a few months--but I doubt. I can do nothing now; I am helpless; I am not my own master. O G.o.d, if I could but go and leave it all behind me!"

Maud could only guess at the meaning of this. He had already hinted to her of business troubles which were crus.h.i.+ng him. But this was a matter of no moment in her sight. There was something more terrible, and she could not force her tongue to speak of it.

"You fear for her?" Paul went on. "You have noticed her strangeness?"

He lowered his voice. "What can I do, Maud?"

"You are so much away," she said hurriedly, laying her hand on his arm.

"Her visitors--she has so many temptations--"

"Temptations?"

"Father, help her against herself!"

"My help is vain. There is a curse on her life, and on mine. I can only stand by and wait for the worst."

She could not speak. It was her duty, clearly her imperative duty, yet she durst not fulfil it. She had come down from her room with the fixed purpose, attained after nights of sleepless struggle, of telling him what she had seen. She found herself alone again, the task unfulfilled.

And she knew that she could not face him again.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

A GARDEN-PARTY

Waymark received with astonishment Maud's letter from Paris. He had seen her only two days before, and their conversation had been of the ordinary kind; Maud had given him no hint of her purpose, not even when he spoke to her of the coming holiday season, and the necessity of her having a change. She confessed she was not well. Sometimes, when they had both sat for some minutes in silence, she would raise her eyes and meet his gaze steadily, seeming to search for something. Waymark could not face this look; it drove him to break the suspense by any kind of remark on an indifferent subject. He remembered now that she had gazed at him in that way persistently on the last evening that they were together. When he was saying good-bye, and as he bent to kiss her, she held him back for a moment, and seemed to wish to say something.

Doubtless she had been on the point of telling him that she was going away; but she let him leave in silence.

It was not a long letter that she wrote; she merely said that change had become indispensable to body and soul, and that it had seemed best to make it suddenly.

"I hope," she wrote in conclusion, "that you will see my father as often as you can; he is very much in need of friendly company, and I should like you to be able to send me news of him. Do not fear for me; I feel already better. I am always with you in spirit, and in the spirit I love you; G.o.d help me to keep my love pure!"

Waymark put away the letter carelessly; the first sensation of surprise over, he did not even care to speculate on the reasons which had led Maud to leave home. It was but seldom now that his thoughts busied themselves with Maud; the unreal importance which she had for a time a.s.sumed in his life was only a recollection; her very face was ghostlike in his mind's eye, dim, always vanis.h.i.+ng. If the news of her departure from England moved him at all, it was with a slight sense of satisfaction; it would be so much easier to write letters to her than to speak face to face. Yet, in the days that followed, the ghostlike countenance hovered more persistently before him than was its wont; there was a far-off pleading in its look, and sometimes that shadow of reproach which our uneasy conscience will cast upon the faces of those we have wronged. This pa.s.sed, however, and another image, one which had ever grown in clearness and persistency of presentment in proportion as Maud's faded away, glided before him in the hours of summer sunlight, and shone forth with the beauty of a rising star against the clouded heaven of his dreams.

Waymark's mood was bitter, but, in spite of himself, it was no longer cynical. He could not indulge himself in that pessimistic scepticism which had aided him in bearing his poverty, and the restless craving of sense and spirit which had accompanied it. His enthusiasm for art was falling away; as a faith it had failed him in his hour of need. In its stead another faith had come to him, a faith which he felt to be all-powerful, and the sole stay of a man's life amid the s.h.i.+fting shadows of intellectual creeds. And it had been revealed too late. Led by perverse motives, now no longer intelligible, he had reached a goal of mere frustration; between him and the true end of his being there was a great gulf fixed.

To Ida, in the meanwhile, these weeks of early summer were bringing health of body and cheerfulness of mind. She spent very much of her time in the open air. Whenever it was possible she and Miss Hurst took their books out into the garden, and let the shadows of the rose-bushes mark the hours for them. Ida's natural vigour throve on the strength-giving properties of sun and breeze the last traces of unwholesome pallor pa.s.sed from her face, and exercise sent her home flushed like the dawn.

One afternoon she went to sit with her grandfather on a bench beneath an apple-tree. The old man had his pipe and a newspaper. Ida was quiet, and glancing at her presently, Abraham found her eyes fixed upon him.

"Grandfather," she said, in her gentlest voice, "will you let me give a garden-party some day next week?"