CHAPTER XLI

Betty Steel sat alone at the open window of her room one evening as the sun went down over the red roofs of the old town. Lying back in her chair, with her head on a cushion of yellow silk, she could see nothing of the life in the square below, but only the tops of the elm-trees, the black spire of the church, and an infinite expanse of cloud-barred sky. The west stood one great splendor of scarlet and of gold. Above, at the zenith, the clouds were bathed in a radiance of auriferous rose. A cold chalcedony blue held the eastern arch, where the purple rim of the night merged into the amethystine shadows of the woodland hills.

Betty Steel was alone, save for the cat Mignon, curled up asleep in her mistress’s lap. Half covering the cat was a crumpled letter, a letter that had been read and reread by eyes that were blind to the pageant of the summer sky. She stirred now and again in her chair, and shivered. The evening seemed cold to her despite all this chaos of color, this kindling of the torches of the west. The house, too, had an empty silence, like a lonely house where death had been and set a seal upon its lips.

Betty lifted Mignon from her lap, rose, crossed the room, and rang the bell. She took a crimson opera-cloak from a wardrobe in the corner, flung it across her shoulders, and returned to her chair, with the crumpled letter still in her hand.

“Yes, ma’am.”

A white cap and apron were framed by the shadows of the landing.

“Is Miss Ellison back yet, Symons?”

“No, ma’am. She said—”

“Listen! Isn’t that the front door?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Will you ask her to come to me here?”

The white cap and apron vanished into the shadows. Betty, lying back in her chair, looked vacantly at the paling sky, with the blood-red cloak deepening the darkness of her hair. The cat Mignon sprang into her lap. Dreamily, and as by habit, she began to stroke the cat, while listening to the murmur of the two voices in the hall below.

Brisk footsteps ascended the stairs, with the swish of silk, and the soft sighing of a woman’s breath.

“Here I am, dear, at last.”

“Shut the door, Madge.”

“I missed my train. You must have wondered what had happened.”

“I have ceased to wonder at anything in life.”

Madge Ellison looked curiously at Betty lying back in her chair, and crossed the room slowly, unbuttoning her gloves.

“You sound rather down, dear. What’s that? Have you heard—?”

Betty Steel’s hand closed spasmodically upon the crumpled letter that she held. Her face was hard and reflective in its outlines. And yet in the eyes there was a pathos of unrest, the unrest of a woman whose gods have left her utterly alone.

“I have heard from Parker.”

Madge Ellison threw her gloves on the bed, unpinned her hat, and waited.

“He is leaving England.”

“Leaving England?”

“Yes, for the Cape.”

“And you?”

“My own mistress to do everything—anything that I please.”

She gave a curious little laugh, and began straightening out the letter on her knee, looking at it with eyes that strove to make cynicism cover the wounded instincts of her womanhood.

“Of course—he does not care. He was afraid to face things.”

“The coward!”

Madge Ellison bent over her, and laid one hand along her cheek.

“And he has left you here?”

“I suppose he thought there was nothing else to do. He says—” and she still smoothed the creased letter under her hand—“you have your own money to live on. The practice is worth nothing under the circumstances. I should advise you to let the house. You cannot afford to live in it on two hundred pounds a year.”

“Is that all you have?”

“My father left it me.”

“Wise father!”

“I never thought, Madge, I should value two hundred pounds so much.”

Mignon, who still possessed some of the kittenish spirit of her youth, rolled over in Betty’s lap, and began to clutch at the letter with her paws. There was something pathetic in the way the wife suffered that scrap of paper to be a plaything for her pet.

“Then he says nothing, dear—?”

“Nothing?”

“About your joining him?”

Betty’s lips curled into a cynical smile.

“Why should he?”

“But, surely—”

“It was I who broke the ties between us. I think I hated him. He had so little—so little manliness and strength.”

Madge Ellison lifted up her face to the fading sky. She was serious for one occasion in her life, a woman touched by the realism of life’s tragedies.

“Can you never—?”

“Don’t ask me that, Madge.”

“You will be well, soon, your old self. It is only temporary.”

“I know.”

“Then—”

“If it were only skin deep; but it is deeper, deep to the heart.”

The confidante gave a sad shrug of her shapely shoulders.

“Don’t say that yet,” she said; “you might repent of it.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

The sky had darkened; the clouds had cast their cloaks of fire, and in the west one broad band of crimson and of gold held back the banners of the approaching night. From St. Antonia’s steeple came the chiming of the hour, slow, solemn tones that filled the silence with mysterious eddies of lingering sound.

Madge Ellison was still leaning over Betty’s chair, her hands touching her friend’s face.

“Try not to brood too much on it, dear. I know I am not much of a woman to give advice. You might say that I had no experience.”

“And I too much! Listen,” and she straightened in her chair, “can’t you hear people shouting?”

“Shouting?”

“Yes; as though there were a fire. It seems to come from Castle Gate.”

They were both silent, listening, and leaning towards the open window. Vague, scattered cries rose from the shadowiness of the darkening town. They seemed to be drawing from Castle Gate towards the square, a low flux of sound that rose and fell like the cadence of the sea upon a shore at night.

Betty sank back in her chair with a glimmer of impatience on her face.

“Of course—I remember.”

From under the arch of the old gate-house a crowd of small boys came scattering into the far corner of the square. A number of men followed, lined along a couple of stout ropes. They were dragging a carriage over the gray cobbles and under the dark elms in the direction of Lombard Street.

Madge Ellison drew back from the window. Not so Betty. She rose from her chair, and stood looking down upon those rough men of the Roxton lanes who were shouting and waving caps with the unsophisticated and exhilarating zest of children.

The carriage with its plebeian team passed under Betty’s window. In it were a man and a woman, the woman holding a boy upon her knees.

Whether some subtle thought-wave passed between those two or not, it happened that Catherine looked up and saw the face at the open window overhead. It seemed to her in the hurly-burly of this little triumph, that the face above looked down at her out of a gloom of loneliness and humiliation. A sudden cry of womanly pity sounded in her heart. Catherine’s arms tightened unconsciously about her boy, and her eyes, that had been smiling, grew thoughtful and very sad.

The carriage rounded the corner and disappeared into Lombard Street, with a small crowd of men, women, and children following in its wake. Betty Steel turned from the window with a laugh.

“It reminds one of a political demonstration.”

Madge Ellison had picked up the letter that the wife had left forgotten on the floor.

“Shall I shut the window, Betty?”

“No, it amuses me; cela va sans dire.”

The men at the ropes had trundled the carriage down Lombard Street, and brought to before the great house opposite the cypress-trees in Porteus Carmagee’s garden. They were very hot and very happy, these Roxton workers, with Mr. William Bains, a stentorian choragus to the crew. A child threw a bunch of flowers into Catherine’s lap.

“Hooray! three cheers for the doctor!”

“Hooray! hooray! hooray!”

The End