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Notwithstanding

<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2> <div class="block2"> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> <div>"Look long, look long in the water Mélisande,</div> <div class="i1">Is there never a face but your own?</div> <div>There is never a soul you shall know Mélisande,</div> <div class="i1">Your soul must stand alone.</div> <div>All alone in the world Mélisande,</div> <div class="i5">Alone, alone."</div> <div class="right">Ethel Clifford.</div> </div></div> </div> The long evening was before Janey. Since her stroke, her mother "retired for the night," as the nurse called it, at nine instead of ten. And at nine, Janey came down to the drawing-room and established herself with her work beside the lamp. Harry, whom nothing could keep awake after his game of dominoes, went to bed at nine also. But to-night, as she took up her work, her spirit quailed at the long array of threadbare thoughts that were lying in wait for her. She dared not think any more. She laid down her work, and took up the paper. But she had no interest in politics. There seemed to be nothing in it. She got up, and taking the lamp in her hand crossed the room and looked at the books in the Chippendale bookcase, the few books which her mother had brought with her from Hulver. They were well chosen, no doubt,[Pg 214] but somehow Janey did not want them. Shakespeare? No. Longfellow? No. She was tired of him, tired even of her favourite lines, "Life is real, life is earnest." Tennyson? No. Pepys' Diary? She had heard people speak of it. No. Bulwer's novels, Jane Austen's, Maria Edgeworth's, Sir Walter Scott's? No. Crooks and Coronets? She had only read it once. She might look at it again. She liked Miss Nevill's books. She had read most of them, not intentionally, but because while she was binding them in brown paper for the village library, she had found herself turning the leaves. She especially liked the last but one, about simple fisher-folk. She often wondered how Miss Nevill knew so much about them. If she had herself been acquainted with fishermen, she would have realized how little the dignified authoress did know. Somehow, she did not care to read even one of Miss Nevill's books to-night. The Magnet, by Reginald Stirling. She hesitated, put out her hand, and took the first of the three volumes from the shelf. She had skimmed it when it came out five years ago, because the Bishop, when he stayed with them for a confirmation, had praised it. Janey had been surprised that he had recommended it when she came to read it, for parts of it were decidedly unpleasant. She might look at it again. She had no recollection of it, except that she had not liked it. Her conversation[Pg 215] with Mr. Stirling had agitated her, but it had also stirred her. Though she did not know it, it was the first time she had come into real contact with an educated and sensitive mind, and one bent for the moment on understanding hers. No one as a rule tried to understand Janey. It was not necessary. No one was interested in her. You might easily love Janey, but you could not easily be interested in her. The book was dusty. It was obvious that The Magnet had not proved a magnet to anyone in the Dower House. She got out an old silk handkerchief from a drawer and dusted it carefully. Then she sat down by the lamp once more and opened it. Ninetieth thousand. Was that many or few to have sold? It seemed to her a good many, but perhaps all books sold as many as that. She glanced at the first page. "To a Blessed Memory." That, no doubt, was the memory of the woman of whom he had spoken. She realized suddenly that it had cost him something to speak of that. Why had he done it? To help Annette? Every one wanted to help and protect Annette, and ward off trouble from her. No one wanted to help or guard her—Janey. "No one?" asked Conscience. Janey saw suddenly the yellow leaves on the flags. She had not noticed them at the time. She saw the two baby-swallows sitting on their[Pg 216] breasts on the sun-warmed stone. She had not noticed them at the time. She saw suddenly, as in a glass, the nobility, the humility, and the benevolence of the man sitting beside her, and his intense desire to save her from what he believed to be a cruel action. She had noticed nothing at the time. She had been full of herself and her own devastating problem. She saw that he had pleaded with her in a great compassion as much on her own account as on Annette's. He had stretched out a hand to help her, had tried to guard her, to ward off trouble from her. This required thought. Janey and Roger could both think, though they did not do so if they could help it, and he did his aloud to Janey by preference whenever it really had to be done. Janey's mind got slowly and reluctantly to its feet. It had been accustomed from early days to walk alone.   A step crunched the gravel, came along the terrace, a well-known step. Roger's face, very red and round-eyed behind a glowing cigarette end, appeared at the open window. "I saw by the lamp you had not gone to bed yet. May I come in?" Coming in. "My! It is like an oven in here." "I will come out," said Janey. They sat down on the terrace on two wicker chairs. It was the first time she had been alone with him since she had met Geoff Lestrange. And as Roger puffed at his [Pg 217]cigarette in silence she became aware that he had something on his mind, and had come to unburden himself to her. The moon was not yet risen, and the church tower and the twisted pines stood as if cut out of black velvet against the dim pearl of the eastern sky. "I came round this afternoon," said Roger in an aggrieved tone, "but you were out." It seems to be a fixed idea, tap-rooted into the very depths of the masculine mind, that it is the bounden duty of women to be in when they call, even if they have not thought fit to mention their flattering intentions. But some of us are ruefully aware that we might remain indoors twenty years without having our leisure interrupted. Janey had on many occasions waited indoors for Roger, but not since he had seen Annette home after the choir practice. "You never seem to be about nowadays," he said. "I was in the Hulver gardens." "Yes, so I thought I would come round now." Roger could extract more creaking out of one wicker garden chair than any other man in Lowshire, and more crackling out of a newspaper, especially if music was going on: that is, unless Annette was singing. He was as still as a stone on those occasions. "How is Aunt Louisa?" "Just the same." "Doctor been?" [Pg 218] "No." "I was over at Noyes this morning about the bridge. Stirling gave me luncheon. I don't know where I'm going to get the money for it, with Aunt Louisa in this state. It's her business to repair the bridge. It's going to cost hundreds." Janey had heard all this before many times. She was aware that Roger was only marking time. "When I was over there," continued Roger, "I saw Bartlet, and he told me Mary Deane—you know who I mean?" "Perfectly." "I heard the child, the little girl, had died suddenly last week. Croup or something. They ought to have let me know. The funeral was yesterday." "Poor woman!" "She and the old servant between them carried the little coffin themselves along the dyke and across the ford. Wouldn't let anyone else touch it. I heard about it from Bartlet. He ought to have let me know. I told him so. He said he thought I did know. That's Bartlet all over. And he said he went up to see her next day, and—and she was gone." "Gone?" "Yes, gone. Cleared out; and the servant too. Cowell said a man from Welysham had called for their boxes. They never went back to the house after the funeral. I ought to have[Pg 219] been told. And to-day I get this," Roger pulled a letter out of his pocket and held it out to her. He lit a match, and by its wavering light she read the few lines, in an educated hand:— <blockquote>"I only took the allowance from you when Dick became too ill to send it, on account of Molly. Now Molly is dead, I do not need it, or the house, or anything of Dick's any more. The key is with Cornell.—M." </blockquote> "Poor woman!" said Janey again. "It's a bad business," said Roger. "She was—there was something nice about her. She wasn't exactly a lady, but there really was something nice about her. And the little girl was Dick over again. You couldn't help liking Molly." "I suppose she has gone back to her own people?" Roger shook his head. "She hasn't any people—never knew who her parents were. She was—the same as her child. She loved Dick, but I don't think she ever forgave him for letting Molly be born out of wedlock. She knew what it meant. It embittered her. It was not only her own pride which had been wounded, and she was a proud woman. But Molly! She resented Molly being illegitimate." "Oh, Roger, what will become of her?" "Goodness knows." "Dick oughtn't to have done it," said Roger slowly, as if he were enunciating some new and[Pg 220] startling hypothesis. "But to do him justice I do believe he might have married her if he'd lived. I think if he cared for anybody it was for her. Dick meant well, but he was touched in his head. She ought not to have trusted him. Not quite like other people; no memory: and never in the same mind two days running." There was a short silence. But Roger had got under way at last. Very soothing at times is a monologue to the weary masculine mind. "I used to think," he went on, "that Dick was the greatest liar and swindler under the sun. He went back on his word, his written word, and he wasn't straight. I'm certain he ran a ramp at Leopardstown. That was the last time he rode in Ireland. You couldn't trust him. But I begin to think that from the first he had a bee in his bonnet, poor chap. I remember Uncle John leathering him within an inch of his life when he was a boy because he said he had not set the big barn alight. And he had. He'd been seen to do it by others as well as by me. I saw him, but I never said. But I believe now he wasn't himself, sort of sleep-walking, and he really had clean forgotten he'd done it. And do you remember about the Eaton Square house?" Of course Janey remembered, but she said, "What about that?" "Why, he wrote to me to tell me he had decided to sell it only last August, a month before his accident, as he wanted cash. He had clean forgotten he had sold it two years ago[Pg 221] and had had the money. Twenty thousand it was." Puff! Puff! "Jones, his valet, you know!" "Yes." "Jones told me privately when I was in Paris a month ago that Dick couldn't last much longer. Gangrene in both feet. The wonder is he has lived so long. Aunt Louisa will get her wish after all. You'll see he will die intestate, and everything will go to Harry. Pity you weren't a boy, Janey. Dick can't make a will now, that's certain, though I don't believe if he could and wanted to, Lady Jane would let him. But whatever happens, the family ought to remember Jones when Dick's gone, and settle something handsome on him for life. Jones has played the game by Dick." Janey thought it was just like Roger to be anxious about the valet, when his own rightful inheritance was slipping away from him. For Roger came next in the male line after Dick, if you did not count Harry. There was a long silence. "When Dick does go," said Roger meditatively,—"moon looks jolly, doesn't it, peeping out behind the tower?—I wonder whether we shall have trouble with the other woman, the one who was with him when he was taken ill." "At Fontainebleau?" "Yes. I hear she was not at all a common person either, and as handsome as paint." [Pg 222] At the back of his mind Roger had a rueful, half-envious feeling that really the luck had been with Dick: one pretty woman after another, while he, Roger, plodded along as good as gold and as dull as ditch water, and only had to provide for the babes of these illicit unions. It did not seem fair. "Perhaps there is another child there," he said. "Oh no, no!" said Janey, wincing. "It's no use saying, 'Oh no, no!' my good girl. It may be, 'Oh yes, yes!' The possibility has to be faced." Roger spoke as a man of the world. "There may be a whole brood of them for aught we know." "Do you think he may possibly have married this—second one?" said Janey tentatively. "No, I don't. If he had, she wouldn't have bolted. Besides, if Dick had married anyone, I do believe it would have been Mary Deane. Well, she's off our hands, poor thing. She won't trouble us again, but I don't expect we shall get off as easy with number two." <hr /> [Pg 223] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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