“Yes, but don’t do that, will you, unless I ring up—I should hear you, of course, and that would wake me and start my head throbbing.” Then as though impelled, in spite of herself, by the girl’s strange attraction, she lifted her face: “Kiss me … oh, God … Stephen!”
“I love you so much—so much—” whispered Stephen.
II
It was past ten o’clock when she got back to Morton: “Has Angela Crossby rung up?” she inquired of Puddle, who appeared to have been waiting in the hall.
“No, she hasn’t!” snapped Puddle, who was getting to the stage when she hated the mere name of Angela Crossby. Then she added: “You look like nothing on earth; in your place I’d go to bed at once, Stephen.”
“You go to bed, Puddle, if you’re tired—where’s Mother?”
“In her bath. For heaven’s sake do come to bed! I can’t bear to see you looking as you do these days.”
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not, you’re all wrong. Go and look at your face.”
“I don’t very much want to, it doesn’t attract me,” smiled Stephen.
So Puddle went angrily up to her room, leaving Stephen to sit with a book in the hall near the telephone bell, in case Angela should ring. And there, like the faithful creature she was, she must sit on all through the night, patiently waiting. But when the first tinges of dawn greyed the window and the panes of the semicircular fanlight, she left her chair stiffly, to pace up and down, filled with a longing to be near this woman, if only to stand and keep watch in her garden—Snatching up a coat she went out to her car.
III
She left the motor at the gates of The Grange, and walked up the drive, taking care to tread softly. The air had an indefinable smell of dew and of very newly born morning. The tall, ornate Tudor chimneys of the house stood out gauntly against a brightening sky, and as Stephen crept into the small herb garden, one tentative bird had already begun singing—but his voice was still rather husky from sleep. She stood there and shivered in her heavy coat; the long night of vigil had devitalized her. She was sometimes like this now—she would shiver at the least provocation, the least sign of fatigue, for her splendid physical strength was giving, worn out by its own insistence.
She dragged the coat more closely around her, and stared at the house which was reddening with sunrise. Her heart beat anxiously, fearfully even, as though in some painful anticipation of she knew not what—every window was dark except one or two that were fired by the sunrise. How long she stood there she never knew, it might have been moments, it might have been a lifetime; and then suddenly there was something that moved—the little oak door that led into that garden. It moved cautiously, opening inch by inch, until at last it was standing wide open, and Stephen saw a man and a woman who turned to clasp as though neither of them could endure to be parted from the arms of the other; and as they clung there together and kissed, they swayed unsteadily—drunk with loving.
Then, as sometimes happens in moments of great anguish, Stephen could only remember the grotesque. She could only remember a plump-bosomed housemaid in the arms of a coarsely amorous footman, and she laughed and she laughed like a creature demented—laughed and laughed until she must gasp for breath and spit blood from her tongue, which had somehow got bitten in her efforts to stop her hysterical laughing; and some of the blood remained on her chin, jerked there by that agonized laughter.
Pale as death, Roger Antrim stared out into the garden, and his tiny moustache looked quite black—like an ink stain smeared above his tremulous mouth by some careless, schoolboy finger.
And now Angela’s voice came to Stephen, but faintly. She was saying something—what was she saying? It sounded absurdly as though it were a prayer—“Christ!” Then sharply—razor-sharp it sounded as it cut through the air: “You, Stephen!”
The laughter died abruptly away, as Stephen turned and walked out of the garden and down the short drive that led to the gates of The Grange, where the motor was waiting. Her face was a mask, quite without expression. She moved stiffly, yet with a curious precision; and she swung up the handle and started the powerful engine without any apparent effort.
She drove at great speed but with accurate judgment, for now her mind felt as clear as spring water, and yet there were strange little gaps in her mind—she had not the least idea where she was going. Every road for miles around Upton was familiar, yet she had not the least idea where she was going. Nor did she know how long she drove, nor when she stopped to procure fresh petrol. The sun rose high and hot in the heavens; it beat down on her without warming her coldness, for always she had the sense of a dead thing that lay close against her heart and oppressed it. A corpse—she was carrying a corpse about with her. Was it the corpse of her love for Angela? If so that love was more terrible dead—oh, far more terrible dead than living.
The first stars were shining, but as yet very faintly, when she found herself driving through the gates of Morton. Heard Puddle’s voice calling: “Wait a minute. Stop, Stephen!” Saw Puddle barring her way in the drive, a tiny yet dauntless figure.
She pulled up with a jerk: “What’s the matter? What is it?”
“Where have you been?”
“I—don’t know, Puddle.”
But Puddle had clambered in beside her: “Listen, Stephen,” and now she was talking very fast, “listen, Stephen—is it—is it Angela Crossby? It is. I can see the thing in
