‘I came to see Mr Boyne,’ he answered. His intonation, rather than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the note, looked at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore, to her short-sighted gaze, a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving ‘on business’, and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.
Past experience had made her equally sensible to such claims; but she was jealous of her husband’s morning hours, and doubtful of his having given anyone the right to intrude on them.
‘Have you an appointment with my husband?’ she asked.
The visitor hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.
‘I think he expects me,’ he replied.
It was Mary’s turn to hesitate. ‘You see, this is his time for work: he never sees anyone in the morning.’
He looked at her a moment without answering; then, as if accepting her decision, he began to move away. As he turned, Mary saw him pause and glance up at the peaceful house-front. Something in his air suggested weariness and disappointment, the dejection of the traveller who has come from far off and whose hours are limited by the time-table. It occurred to her that if this were the case her refusal might have made his errand vain, and a sense of compunction caused her to hasten after him.
‘May I ask if you have come a long way?’
He gave her the same grave look. ‘Yes – I have come a long way.’
‘Then, if you’ll go to the house, no doubt my husband will see you now. You’ll find him in the library.’
She did not know why she had added the last phrase, except from a vague impulse to atone for her previous inhospitality. The visitor seemed about to express his thanks, but her attention was distracted by the approach of the gardener with a companion who bore all the marks of being the expert from Dorchester.
‘This way,’ she said, waving the stranger to the house; and an instant later she had forgotten him in the absorption of her meeting with the boiler-maker.
The encounter led to such far-reaching results that the engineer ended by finding it expedient to ignore his train, and Mary was beguiled into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed confabulation among the flower-pots. When the colloquy ended, she was surprised to find that it was nearly luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to meet her. But she found no one in the court but an undergardener raking the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed Boyne to be still at work.
Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay to which the morning’s conference had pledged her. The fact that she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the vague fears of the previous days, it now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had said, things in general had never been ‘righter’.
She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlour-maid, from the threshold, roused her with an inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a State secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an absent-minded assent.
She felt Trimmle wavering doubtfully on the threshold, as if in rebuke of such unconsidered assent; then her retreating steps sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall and went to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his usual measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus impelled, opened the library door.
Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him before the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her that he was not there.
She turned back to the parlour-maid.
‘Mr Boyne must be upstairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.’
Trimmle appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obedience and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid on her. The struggle resulted in her saying: ‘If you please, madam, Mr Boyne’s not upstairs.’
‘Not in his room? Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure, madam.’
Mary consulted the clock. ‘Where is he, then?’
‘He’s gone out,’ Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have put first.
Mary’s conjecture had been right, then; Boyne must have gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round to the court. She crossed the hall to the french window opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlour-maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out: ‘Please, madam, Mr Boyne didn’t go that way.’
Mary turned back. ‘Where did he go? And when?’
‘He went out of the front door, up the drive, madam.’ It was a matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a
