He felt a thrill in the arm he held, and an inclination as if to throw him off, but he was not to be thrown off; he was small but very tenacious, and clung to his hold.
“That is what I want to know. The beginning. Did he meet anyone? had he any dispute or altercation in the wood?”
“None that I know of,” said Rintoul. He spoke sulkily, almost in an undertone, so that Millefleurs had to concentrate his attention upon the voice, which was interrupted by all the sounds in the air, the rustling of the trees, the sough of the river far away.
“Did you see anyone about?” said Millefleurs.
The two men were in the dark—they could not see each other’s faces, yet they stopped and looked at each other, anxiously, suspiciously, each at the red end of the other’s cigar, which disclosed a moustache, a shadow above.
“Anyone about? I don’t think there was anyone about,” said Rintoul, still more sullenly. “What should put that into your mind? You were not there?”
This was a curious question, but Millefleurs made no note of it, his mind being possessed by an entirely different idea. He said, “No, I was not there. I drove home with your mother, don’t you know. To think we should have passed without the least knowing it, the place which so soon was to be the scene of such a tragedy.”
“Don’t romance about it. It’s bad enough as it is. You did not pass the scene. It was on the other road, a long way from yours.”
“At which side?”
“The left side,” said Rintoul, carelessly. “I wish, if you don’t mind, that you would change the subject. My nerves are all wrong. I didn’t know I was such a feeble beggar. I’d rather not dwell upon it, if you don’t mind.”
“The left side?” said Millefleurs, with a sigh—and then there was a pause. “You are quite sure,” he added anxiously, “that you did not see anyone in the wood?”
Rintoul almost thrust this question away. “I tell you I won’t be questioned,” he said. Then, composing himself with an effort, “I beg your pardon, Millefleurs—I never liked the man, though he was my brother-in-law; and to see all at once a fellow whom perhaps you had been thinking badly of two minutes before, wishing no good to—to see him lying there stiff and stark—”
“I beg you a thousand pardons, Rintoul,” Millefleurs said gravely. And they went in together, saying no more.
XXIX
Lady Lindores and Edith were carried along through the darkness of the night with that curious sense of rapid unseen movement which has in it a kind of soothing influence upon suspense and mental distress. They spoke to each other in the darkness of Carry—poor Carry! how would she take it? but yet never ventured, even to each other, to express the innermost feeling in their minds on this subject. As they drove along, the gleam of other lamps went rapidly past them close to the gate of Dalrulzian, leading back their thoughts for a moment to other interests. “It is John Erskine’s dogcart. Is he going away? is it someone arriving? has he been dining somewhere?” Lady Lindores said, with the unconscious curiosity of the country. Then she said with a little shudder, “I wonder if he can have heard?”—that first question which always suggests itself in the face of a great event. “How strange to think that someone has been peacefully dining out while that has been happening—so near!” Edith answered only by pressing her mother’s arm in which her own was entwined, as they sat close together for mutual consolation. She had other troubled wandering thoughts aching in her own heart; but of these she said nothing, but watched the lamps turning up the Dalrulzian avenue with a thrill of mingled feeling, half angry that he should not have divined she was in trouble, half glad that he thus proved his ignorance of all that had occurred. Thus unknowing, Carry’s mother and sister crossed in the dark another new actor in Carry’s history, of whom no one as yet had thought.
Carry was seated in her own room alone. It was her natural refuge at such a moment. A fire had been lighted by the anxious servants—who saw her shiver in the nervous excitement of this great and terrible event—and blazed brightly, throwing ruddy gleams of light through the room, and wavering ghostly shadows upon the wall. The great bed, with its tall canopies and heavy ornaments, shrouded round with satin curtains, looped and festooned with tarnished gold lace and every kind of clumsy grandeur, stood like a sort of catafalque, the object of a thousand airy assaults and attacks from the fantastic light, but always dark—a funereal object in the midst; while the tall polished wardrobes all round the room gave back reflections like dim mirrors, showing nothing but the light. Two groups of candles on the high mantelpiece, twinkling against the dark wall, were the only other illuminations. Carry sat sunk in a big chair close to the fire. If she could have cried—if she could have talked and lamented—if she could have gone to bed—or, failing this, if she had read her Bible—the maids in the house, who hung about the doors in anxiety and curiosity, would have felt consoled for her. But she did none of these. She only sat there, her slight figure lost in the depths of the chair, still in the white dress which she had worn to receive her guests in the morning. She had not stirred—the women said, gathering round Lady Lindores in whispering eagerness—for hours, and had not even touched the cup of tea they had carried to her. “Oh, my lady, do something to make her cry,” the women said. “If she doesn’t get it out it’ll break her heart.” They had forgotten, with the facile emotion which death, and especially a death so
