‘Up the drive? At this hour?’ Mary went to the door herself and glanced across the court through the tunnel of bare limes. But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering.
‘Did Mr Boyne leave no message?’
Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos.
‘No, madam. He just went out with the gentleman.’
‘The gentleman? What gentleman?’ Mary wheeled about, as if to front this new factor.
‘The gentleman who called, madam,’ said Trimmle resignedly.
‘When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!’
Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached enough to note in Trimmle’s eyes the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too hard.
‘I couldn’t exactly say the hour, madam, because I didn’t let the gentleman in,’ she replied, with an air of discreetly ignoring the irregularity of her mistress’s course.
‘You didn’t let him in?’
‘No, madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes –’
‘Go and ask Agnes, then,’ said Mary.
Trimmle still wore her look of patient magnanimity.
‘Agnes would not know, madam, for she had unfortunately burned her hand in trimming the wick of the new lamp from town’ – Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new lamp – ‘and so Mrs Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.’
Mary looked again at the clock. ‘It’s after two. Go and ask the kitchen-maid if Mr Boyne left any word.’
She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought to her there the kitchen-maid’s statement that the gentleman had called about eleven o’clock, and that Mr Boyne had gone out with him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller’s name, for he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr Boyne.
Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over, and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne’s experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne’s withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years, with their ‘standup’ lunches and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-cars, he cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife’s fancy for the unexpected, and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of pleasure in the recurrences of habit.
Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne’s precautions would sooner or later prove unavailing, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.
This conclusion relieved her from further preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post office, a mile or so away; and when she turned towards home the early twilight was setting in.
She had taken a footpath across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the high-road, there was little likelihood of their meeting. She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted exactness of visual memory she observed that the papers on her husband’s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to luncheon.
Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long, silent room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her shortsighted eyes strained through them, half discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible presence she threw herself on the bell-rope and gave it a sharp pull.
The sharp summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the usual.
‘You may bring tea if Mr Boyne is in,’ she said, to justify her ring.
‘Very well, madam. But Mr Boyne is not in,’ said Trimmle, putting down the lamp.
‘Not in? You mean he’s come back and gone out again?’
‘No, madam. He’s never been back.’
The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.
‘Not since he went out with – the gentleman?’
‘Not since he went out with the gentleman.’
‘But who was the gentleman?’ Mary insisted, with the shrill note of someone trying to be heard through a confusion of noises.
‘That I couldn’t say, madam.’ Trimmle, standing there by the lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.
‘But the kitchen-maid knows – wasn’t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?’
‘She doesn’t know either, madam, for he wrote his name on a folded paper.’
Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of conformity. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.
‘But he must
