Chapter III

Miss Graham was not a demonstrative woman. On her return home she somewhat startled her father, as he sat by his study table, deeply interested in his diagnosis book, by the sudden violence of her embrace.

“Why this excitement?” he asked, smiling and turning round. He was a young-looking man for his age; his thin wiry figure and clear colour belied the evidence on his hair, tinged with grey, and the tired wrinkles that gave value to the acuteness and brilliancy of the eyes they surrounded.

“I don’t know!” she replied, “only you are so nice and alive somehow. I always feel like this when I come back from seeing the Arnes.”

“Then don’t go to see the Arnes.”

“I’m so fond of her, father, and she will never come here to me, as you know. Or else nothing would induce me to enter her tomb of a house, and talk to that walking funeral of a husband of hers. I managed to get away to-day without having to shake hands with him. I always try to avoid it. But, father, I do wish you would go and see Alice.”

“Is she ill?”

“Well, not exactly ill, I suppose, but her eyes make me quite uncomfortable, and she says such odd things! I don’t know if it is you or the clergyman she wants, but she is all wrong somehow! She never goes out except to church; she never pays a call, or has any one to call on her! Nobody ever asks the Arnes to dinner, and I’m sure I don’t blame them--the sight of that man at one’s table would spoil any party--and they never entertain. She is always alone. Day after day I go in and find her sitting over the fire, with that same brooding expression. I shouldn’t be surprised in the least if she were to go mad some day. Father, what is it? What is the tragedy of the house? There is one I am convinced. And yet, though I have been the intimate friend of that woman for years, I know no more about her than the man in the street.”

“She keeps her skeleton safe in the cupboard,” said Dr. Graham. “I respect her for that. And please don’t talk nonsense about tragedies. Alice Arne is only morbid--the malady of the age. And she is a very religious woman.”

“I wonder if she complains of her odious husband to Mr. Bligh. She is always going to his services.”

“Odious?”

“Yes, odious!” Miss Graham shuddered. “I cannot stand him! I cannot bear the touch of his cold froggy hands, and the sight of his fishy eyes! That inane smile of his simply makes me shrivel up. Father, honestly, do you like him yourself?”

“My dear, I hardly know him! It is his wife I have known ever since she was a child, and I a boy at college. Her father was my tutor. I never knew her husband till six years ago, when she called me in to attend him in a very serious illness. I suppose she never speaks of it? No? A very odd affair. For the life of me I cannot tell how he managed to recover. You needn’t tell people, for it affects my reputation, but I didn’t save him! Indeed I have never been able to account for it. The man was given over for dead!”

“He might as well be dead for all the good he is,” said Esther scornfully. “I have never heard him say more than a couple of sentences in my life.”

“Yet he was an exceedingly brilliant young man; one of the best men of his year at Oxford--a good deal run after--poor Alice was wild to marry him!”

“In love with that spiritless creature? He is like a house with some one dead in it, and all the blinds down!”

“Come, Esther, don’t be morbid--not to say silly! You are very hard on the poor man! What’s wrong with him? He is the ordinary, commonplace, cold-blooded specimen of humanity, a little stupid, a little selfish,--people who have gone through a serious illness like that are apt to be--but on the whole, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen----”

“Yes, and his wife is afraid of him, and his child hates him!” exclaimed Esther.

“Nonsense!” said Dr. Graham sharply. “The child is spoilt. Only children are apt to be--and the mother wants a change or a tonic of some kind. I’ll go and talk to her when I have time. Go along and dress. Have you forgotten that George Graham is coming to dinner?”

After she had gone the doctor made a note on the corner of his blotting-pad, “Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne,” and dismissed the subject of the memorandum entirely from his mind.

* * * * * * *

George Graham was the doctor’s nephew, a tall, weedy, cumbrous young man, full of fads and fallacies, with a gentle manner that somehow inspired confidence. He was several years younger than Esther, who loved to listen to his semi-scientific, semi-romantic stories of things met with in the course of his profession. “Oh, I come across very queer things!” he would say mysteriously, “There’s a queer little widow----!”

“Tell me about your little widow?” asked Esther that day after dinner, when, her father having gone back to his study, she and her cousin sat together as usual.

He laughed.

“You like to hear of my professional experiences? Well, she certainly interested me,” he said thoughtfully. “She is an odd psychological study in her way. I wish I could come across her again.”

“Where did you come across her, and what is her name?”

“I don’t know her name, I don’t want to; she is not a personage to me, only a case. I hardly know her face even. I have never seen it except in the twilight. But I gathered that she lived somewhere in Chelsea, for she came out on to the Embankment with only a kind of lacy thing over her head; she can’t live far off, I fancy.”

Esther became instantly attentive. “Go on,” she said.

“It was three weeks ago,” said George Graham. “I was coming along the Embankment about ten o’clock. I walked through that little grove, you know, just between Cheyne Walk and the river, and I heard in there some one sobbing very bitterly. I looked and saw a woman sitting on a seat, with her head in her hands, crying. I was most awfully sorry, of course, and I thought I could perhaps do something for her, get her a glass of water, or salts, or something. I took her for a woman of the people--it was quite dark, you know. So I asked her very politely if I could do anything for her, and then I noticed her hands--they were quite white and covered with diamonds.”

“You were sorry you spoke, I suppose,” said Esther.

“She raised her head and said--I believe she laughed--‘Are you going to tell me to move on?’”

“She thought you were a policeman?”

“Probably--if she thought at all--but she was in a semi-dazed condition. I told her to wait till I came back, and dashed round the corner to the chemist’s and bought a bottle of salts. She thanked me, and made a little effort to rise and go away. She seemed very weak. I told her I was a medical man, I started in and talked to her.”

“And she to you?”

“Yes, quite straight. Don’t you know that women always treat a doctor as if he were one step removed from their father confessor--not human--not in the same category as themselves? It is not complimentary to one as a man, but one hears a good deal one would not otherwise hear. She ended by telling me all about herself--in a veiled way, of course. It soothed her--relieved her--she seemed not to have had an outlet for years!”

“To a mere stranger!”

“To a doctor. And she did not know what she was saying half the time. She was hysterical, of course. Heavens! what nonsense she talked! She spoke of herself as a person somehow haunted, cursed by some malign fate, a victim of some fearful spiritual catastrophe, don’t you know? I let her run on. She was convinced of the reality of a sort of ‘doom’ that she had fancied had befallen her. It was quite pathetic. Then it got rather chilly--she shivered--I suggested her going in. She shrank back; she said, ‘If you only knew what a relief it is, how much less miserable I am out here! I can breathe; I can live--it is my only glimpse of the world that is alive--I live in a grave--oh, let me stay!’ She seemed positively afraid to go home.”

“Perhaps some one bullied her at home.”

“I suppose so, but then--she had no husband. He died, she told me, years ago. She had adored him, she said----”

“Is she pretty?”

“Pretty! Well, I hardly noticed. Let me see! Oh, yes, I suppose she was pretty--no, now I think of it, she would be too worn and faded to be what you call pretty.”

Esther smiled.

“Well, we sat there together for quite an hour, then the clock of Chelsea church struck eleven, and she got up and said ‘Good-bye,’ holding out her hand quite naturally, as if our meeting and conversation had been nothing out of the common. There was a sound like a dead leaf trailing across the walk and she was gone.”

“Didn’t you ask if you should see her again?”

“That would have been a mean advantage to take.”

“You might have offered to see her home.”

“I saw she did not mean me to.”

“She was a lady, you say,” pondered Esther. “How was she dressed?”

“Oh, all right, like a lady--in black--mourning, I suppose. She has dark crinkly hair, and her eyebrows are very thin and arched--I noticed that in the dusk.”

“Does this photograph remind you of her?” asked Esther suddenly, taking him to the mantelpiece.

“Rather!”

“Alice! Oh, it couldn’t be--she is not a widow, her husband is alive--has your friend any children?”

“Yes, one, she mentioned it.”

“How old?”

“Six years old, I think she said. She talks of the ‘responsibility of bringing up an orphan.’”

“George, what time is it?” Esther asked suddenly.

“About nine o’clock.”

“Would you mind coming out with me?”

“I should like it. Where shall we go?”

“To St. Adhelm’s! It is close by here. There is a special late service to-night, and Mrs. Arne is sure to be there.”

“Oh, Esther--curiosity!”

“No, not mere curiosity. Don’t you see if it is my Mrs. Arne who talked to you like this, it is very serious? I have thought her ill for a long time; but as ill as that!----”

At St. Adhelm’s Church, Esther Graham pointed out a woman who was kneeling beside a pillar in an attitude of intense devotion and abandonment. She rose from her knees, and turned her rapt face up towards the pulpit whence the Reverend Ralph Bligh was holding his impassioned discourse. George Graham touched his cousin on the shoulder, and motioned to her to leave her place on the outermost rank of worshippers.

“That is the woman!” said he.