Fear Read online

  ‘I’m dying for my tea, you know; and here’s a letter for you,’ he said.

  She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all enclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.

  Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her husband a newspaper clipping.

  ‘Ned! What’s this? What does it mean?’

  He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.

  ‘What’s what? You fairly made me jump!’ Boyne said at length, moving towards her with a sudden half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

  Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

  ‘This article – from the Waukesha Sentinel – that a man named Elwell has brought suit against you – that there was something wrong about the Blue Star Mine. I can’t understand more than half.’

  They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment she saw that her words had the almost immediate effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.

  ‘Oh, that!’ He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar. ‘What’s the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you’d got bad news.’

  She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under the reassurance of his tone.

  ‘You knew about this, then – it’s all right?’

  ‘Certainly I knew about it; and it’s all right.’

  ‘But what is it? I don’t understand. What does this man accuse you of?’

  ‘Pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.’ Boyne had tossed the clipping down and thrown himself into an armchair near the fire. ‘Do you want to hear the story? It’s not particularly interesting – just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star.’

  ‘But who is this Elwell? I don’t know the name.’

  ‘Oh, he’s a fellow I put into it – gave him a hand up. I told you all about him at the time.’

  ‘I dare say. I must have forgotten.’ Vainly she strained back among her memories. ‘But if you helped him, why does he make this return?’

  ‘Probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over. It’s all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.’

  His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne’s report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt during their years of exile, that, in a community where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of efforts as arduous as her husband’s professional labours, such brief leisure as he and she could command should be used as an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was built.

  She glanced at her husband, and was again reassured by the composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her reassurance.

  ‘But doesn’t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about it?’

  He answered both questions at once. ‘I didn’t speak of it at first because it did worry me – annoyed me, rather. But it’s all ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of the Sentinel.’

  She felt a quick thrill of relief. ‘You mean it’s over? He’s lost his case?’

  There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne’s reply. ‘The suit’s been withdrawn – that’s all.’

  But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of being too easily put off. ‘Withdrawn it because he saw he had no chance?’

  ‘Oh, he had no chance,’ Boyne answered.

  She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts.

  ‘How long ago was it withdrawn?’

  He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. ‘I’ve just had the news now; but I’ve been expecting it.’

  ‘Just now – in one of your letters?’

  ‘Yes; in one of my letters.’

  She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of waiting, that he had risen and, strolling across the room, had placed himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met his smiling eyes.

  ‘It’s all right – it’s all right?’ she questioned, through the flood of her dissolving doubts; and, ‘I give you my word it was never righter!’ he laughed back at her, holding her close.

  One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the next day’s strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery of her sense of security.

  It was in the air when she awoke in her low-ceiled, dusky room; it went with her downstairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her from the fire, and reduplicated itself from the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian tea-pot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused fears of the previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper article – as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past, had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband’s affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith had now affirmed itself in the very face of menace and suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and unconsciously himself, than after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of her doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

  It was as clear, thank heaven, as the bright outer light that surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in mouth, above his papers; and now she had her own morning’s task to perform. The task involved, on such charmed winter days, almost as much happy loitering about the different quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work there. There were such endless possibilities still before her, such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter was all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to the kitchen garden, where the espaliered pear trees drew complicated patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their cote.

  There was something wrong about the piping of the hothouse and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned exotics – even the flora of Lyng was in the note! – she learned that the great man had not arrived,