Love

XXI

Mrs. Mitcham, not expecting her mistress back till Monday, went on that Saturday to visit a friend in Camden Town, and when she came back soon after nine was surprised to find Miss Virginia’s husband on the mat outside the door of the flat ringing the bell. He, of all people, should know her mistress wasn’t there, thought Mrs. Mitcham, seeing that it was in Miss Virginia’s house she was staying.

The carpet on the stairs was thick, and Mrs. Mitcham arrived at Stephen’s side unnoticed. He was absorbed in ringing. He rang and rang.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham respectfully.

He turned quickly. ‘Where is your mistress?’ he inquired.

‘My mistress, sir?’ said Mrs. Mitcham, much surprised. ‘I understood she was coming back on Monday, sir.’

‘She left the Manor this afternoon on her way home. She ought to have been here long ago. Have you had no telegram announcing her arrival?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, I have,’ he said, looking quite upset, Mrs. Mitcham noticed, and pulling a telegram out of his overcoat pocket. ‘My wife telegraphed her mother had started, and asked me to see if she got here safely.’

‘Safely, sir?’ echoed Mrs. Mitcham, surprised at the word.

‘Mrs. Cumfrit was—motoring up. As you know, my wife should not be worried and made anxious just now,’ said Stephen frowning. ‘It is most undesirable—most undesirable.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham. ‘But I’m sure there is no cause. Mrs. Cumfrit will be here presently. It’s not more than nine o’clock, sir.’

‘She left at half-past two.’

‘Allowing for punctures, sir——’ suggested Mrs. Mitcham respectfully. ‘Will you come in, sir?’ she added, unlocking the door and holding it open for him.

‘Yes—and wait,’ said Stephen in a determined voice.

He went straight into the drawing-room without taking off his overcoat. That Miss Virginia’s husband was upset was plain to Mrs. Mitcham. He hardly seemed like the same gentleman who had on his last visit so nicely called her and her mistress little children and told them to love one another. She was quite glad to get away from him into her calm kitchen.

Stephen was very much upset. He had received Virginia’s telegram at six o’clock, just as he was quietly sitting in his hotel bedroom going over his sermons and giving them the last important touches. These were valuable hours, these afternoon and evening hours of the Saturdays before he preached, and to be taken away from them for any reason was most annoying. To be taken away from them for this one was more than annoying, it was gravely disturbing. Again that side-car; again that young man; as if a whole morning in it and with him were not sufficiently deplorable. No wonder his poor little darling at home was anxious. She said so in the telegram. It ran: Mother left for Hertford Street in Mr. Monckton’s side-car 2.30. Do see if arrived safely. Anxious.

Two-thirty; and it was then six. He went round at once. He didn’t know much about motor-cycles, but at the pace he had seen them going he judged that Monckton, not less swift than his confrères in upsetting the peace of God’s countryside, would have had time to get to London.

No one, however, was in the flat, not even Mrs. Mitcham, who was bound to it by duty. He rang in vain. As he went away he inquired of the hall porter why no one was there, and learned that Mrs. Mitcham had gone out at three o’clock and had not yet returned, and that Mrs. Cumfrit had been away for the last week in the country,—which he already only too well knew.

At half-past seven he called again—his sermons would suffer, he was painfully aware—but with the same result. It was dark then, and he too began to feel anxious; not on his mother-in-law’s account, for whatever happened to her would be entirely her own fault, but on Virginia’s. She would be in a terrible state if she knew her mother had not reached home yet. That Mrs. Mitcham should still be absent from her duties he regarded as not only reprehensible and another proof of Mrs. Cumfrit’s laxness, but as a sign that she was unaware of her mistress’s impending return, which was strange.

Immediately after dinner—a bad one, but if it had been good he could not have appreciated it in his then condition of mind—he went back to Hertford Street, and unable to believe, in spite of the hall porter’s assurances, that the flat was still empty, rang and rang, and was found by Mrs. Mitcham ringing. His mother-in-law must be there by now. She was inside. He felt she was inside, and had gone to bed tired.

But directly he got in he knew she was not. There was a chill, a silence about the flat, such as only places abandoned by their inhabitants have. The drawing-room was as cold and tidy as a corpse. He kept his coat on. The idea of taking it off in such bleakness would not have occurred to him. He would have liked to keep his hat on too, for he had gone bald early, but the teaching of his youth on the subject of ladies’ drawing-rooms and what to do in them prevented him.

Mrs. Mitcham, coming in to light the fire, found him staring out of the window in the dark. The room was only lit by the shining in of the street lamps. She was quite sorry for him. She had not supposed him so much attached to Mrs. Cumfrit. Mrs. Mitcham was herself feeling rather worried by now, and as she made Catherine’s bed and got her room ready she had only kept cheerful by recollecting that a car had four tyres, all of which might puncture, besides innumerable other parts, no doubt equally able to have things the matter with them.

‘I’ll light the fire, if you please, sir,’ she said.

‘Not for me,’ said Stephen, without moving.

She lit it nevertheless, and also turned on the light by the sofa. She didn’t like to draw the curtains, because he continued to stand at the window staring into the street. Watching, thought Mrs. Mitcham; watching anxiously. She was quite touched.

‘Is there anything you would like, sir?’ she inquired.

‘Nothing,’ said Stephen, his gaze riveted on the street.

Throughout that dreadful night Stephen watched at the window, and Mrs. Mitcham came in at intervals to see what she could do for him. She made coffee at eleven o’clock, and brought it to him, and fetched it away again at midnight cold and untouched. She carried in an armful of blankets at one o’clock, and arranged a bed for him on the sofa, into which he did not go. At five she brought him tea, which he did not drink. At eight she began to get breakfast ready. Throughout the night he stood at the window, or walked up and down the room, and each time she saw him he seemed to have grown thinner. Certainly his face looked sharper than it had the night before. Mrs. Mitcham could not but be infected by such agitation, though being naturally optimistic she felt somehow that her mistress was delayed rather than hurt. Still, it was impossible to see a gentleman like Mr. Colquhoun, a gentleman of great learning, she had heard, who must know everything about everything and had preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral,—it was impossible to see such a gentleman grow thinner with anxiety before one’s eyes without becoming, in spite of one’s secret faith, anxious too. And the hard fact that her mistress’s bed had not been slept in stared her in the face.

‘I must wash,’ said Stephen hoarsely, when she told him breakfast was ready and would do him good.

She conducted him to the bathroom.

‘I must shave,’ he said, looking at her with hollow eyes. ‘I have to preach this morning. I must go back to my hotel and shave.’

‘Oh no, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham; and brought him George’s razors—a little blunt, but yet razors.

He stared at them. His eyes seemed to become more hollow.

‘Razors?’ he said. ‘Here?’

That there should be razors in the apartment of a widow——

‘The late Mr. Cumfrit’s, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham.

Of course. Really his control was gone; he was no longer apparently able to keep his thoughts from plunging into the most incredible places.

He stropped the razors, thinking of the probable last time they had been stropped by his father-in-law before being folded away by him who would never strop again, and shaved in front of the glass in the bathroom before which the excellent man must so often have stood. Pulvis et umbra sumum, said Stephen to himself in his profound dejection, forgetting for a moment the glorious resurrection he so carefully believed in. At what point did one, he wondered, his mind returning to his troubles,—at what point did one, in the circumstances in which he found himself, inform the police?

He forced himself to eat some breakfast for fear he might otherwise collapse in the pulpit, and he drank a cup of strong coffee with the same idea of being kept up. The thought that it was his own mother-in-law who had brought all this trouble on him had a peculiar sting. Quite evidently there had been an accident, and God knew how he would get through his sermon, with the fear crushing him of the effect such terrible news would have on the beloved mother of his child to be. There was no blessing, he told himself, outside the single straight path of one’s duty. If his mother-in-law had continued in that path as she used to continue in it, instead of suddenly taking to giving way to every impulse—that she should still have impulses was in itself indecent—this misery for Virginia, and accordingly for himself, would have been avoided. To go rushing about the country with a young man,—why, how scandalous at her age. And the punishment for this, the accident that had so evidently happened, fell most heavily, as punishments so mysteriously often did—only one must not question God’s wisdom—on the innocent. What living thing in the whole world could be more innocent than his wife? Except the child; except the little soul of love she bore about with her beneath her heart; and that too would suffer through her suffering.

Stephen prayed. He couldn’t bear the thought of what Virginia was going to suffer. He bowed his head on his arms and prayed. Mrs. Mitcham found him like this when she came to clear away the breakfast. She was deeply sorry for him; he seemed to have been so much more attached to her mistress than one would have ever guessed.

‘You’ll feel better, sir,’ she consoled him, ‘when your breakfast has had more time.’ And she ventured to ask, ‘Was it Miss Virginia’s car bringing Mrs. Cumfrit up? I beg pardon, sir—I mean, your car? Because if so, I’ll be bound she’ll be safe with Smithers.’

Stephen shook his head. He could bear no questions. He could not go into the story of the motor-cycle with Mrs. Mitcham. He felt ill after his night walking about the drawing-room; his head seemed to be bursting. He got up and left the room.

He had to go to the hotel on his way to St. Jude’s to fetch his sermon. He waited till the last possible minute, still hoping that some news might come; and then, when he dared wait no longer, and Mrs. Mitcham was helping him into his coat, he told her he would come back immediately after morning service and consider what steps should be taken as to informing the police.

‘The police?’ repeated Mrs. Mitcham, much shocked. The police and her mistress. Out of her heart disappeared the last ray of optimism.

‘We must somehow find out what has happened,’ said Stephen sharply.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, opening the door for him.

The police and her mistress. She had a feeling that the mere putting the police on to search would make them find something dreadful,—that if nothing had happened, the moment they began to look something would have happened.

Feeling profoundly conscious of being only a weak woman in a world full of headstrong men, she opened the door for Stephen, and he, going through it without further speech, met Catherine coming out of the lift,—Catherine perfectly sound and unharmed,—and with her was Christopher.

They all three stopped dead.

‘You, Stephen?’ said Catherine after a moment, very faintly. ‘Why, how——?’

‘I have,’ said Stephen, ‘been waiting all night. Waiting and watching for you.’

‘I—we—broke down.’

He made a sign to the lift boy that he was coming down with him.

‘Enough—enough,’ he said, with a queer gesture of pushing her and everything connected with her out of his sight; and hurried into the lift and disappeared.

Catherine and Christopher looked at each other.