Chapter XVIII

The storm had darkened down earth, ocean, and sky to one lurid yet colourless gloom; the wind was incessant, a north-easterly gale, continuous day and night, rattling and pounding against the cliffs, ravaging the land. The few scattered inhabitants of St. Nite’s village and St. Nite’s Point kept to their houses, and shuttered them well at night, for the cold was formidable, and bit to the bone; to walk abroad was like struggling through freezing water, and this quality of cold seemed to have a quality of blackness also, and to be a visible entity, as the wind also seemed a visible entity.

Ambrosia, shivering at the windows of Sellar’s Mead, thought that she could see them--cold and wind--abroad like two giant ogres, blowing, from the smitten heavens, chilly disaster upon the shuddering earth.

With a courage at once cold and nervous, she kept up the routine of her large, silent house. They were well supplied against storms, well used to long and dreadful winters, by no means dependent upon the ferry for any communication with the world. She could keep her precise household running without worrying about the hope of the comings and goings of wagon and ferry. No detail of her exact management was interfered with; day by day she occupied herself with that. Everything was smooth and elegant. The table was loaded at the appointed time with glass and silver and lace and finely-cooked food, and abundance of luxurious provisions. The rooms were warm and lit, and finely kept, the servants moving about noiselessly, each in his appointed place, doing his appointed duty.

And she was upstairs and downstairs with her keys and her books and her lists, giving out the store, sorting the linen, visiting the still-room, testing the preserves, superintending the cooking, sending out blankets and firewood and food for this or that sick or bedridden person; and always conscious of the wind, beating not only round her house but round her heart, she thought.

There had never been any more news of the Countess Fanny since the day when the fisherman came into the parlour at Sellar’s Mead, with her bonnet and shawl in his hand; and it was now into the third week from her disappearance.

Everyone agreed, in shocked and scandalised whispers, that the foreign young lady was dead now; there could be no other solution of this mystery. Was it not enough that her garments had been found on the wet and slippery rocks? There was nowhere on this wild promontory where she could have been so long hidden; there was nowhere on this wild promontory where she could have escaped. It was known, beyond all possibility of error, that she had not left St. Nite’s either on foot or in any manner of conveyance. She had disappeared as completely as some bright, gay land-bird, blown out seawards by the storm and drowned in the first surge of the advancing billows.

On the ninth day, the fisher-folk had ventured out, for all the rage of the tempest, to watch for her body being cast up; for they held strongly to that superstition that on the ninth day all dead are returned from the sea. But the body of the Countess Fanny had not come back.

An accident, said the few gentlefolk--the vicar and the doctor and their womenkind. An accident, said Ambrosia and the old Earl--what else could it be but an appalling accident? The wilful and impetuous girl had gone out alone on that wild morning, and she had walked along the rocks. From the first, they all remarked, these had seemed to have a fascination for her: witness her interest in the lighthouse, placed on the most stormy of these precipitous crags.

She had proceeded along the rocks, enjoying, no doubt, the spray on her face and the wind in her ears, and the light of the tossing clouds above her, and the flash and glitter of the shrieking sea-birds; and then she had slipped, and before she had recovered herself, been washed away and dashed to death against the grey stone, and carried out to the sea, and lost for ever.… They decided that she must have died instantly--without a single moment of terror, they hoped. So they pronounced upon the end of the Countess Fanny. Only old Miss Drayton, the doctor’s sister, asked timidly:

“Why did the poor thing take off her bonnet and shawl?” And there had been a little pause when she asked this, and no one had looked at the other.

But Ambrosia had spoken, with a hard nervousness. “She was very fond of doing that--taking off her bonnet and swinging it by the strings, and letting the air blow through her hair. She was very wild, you know.”

“She seemed to me very elegant and accomplished,” remarked Mr. Spragge mildly.

“Oh yes, she was that!” said Amy with a heightened colour. “But wild, too, you know--and she liked the storm. And she took off her shawl, I suppose, for the same reason. It cumbered her--it must have been wet and heavy.”

The vicar’s wife remarked quietly that it was a very cold day for anyone to take off a shawl and bonnet, however wet.

“Without that amount of protection she must in a moment have been wet to the skin, chilled to the marrow, hardly able to move.”

“Well,” answered Ambrosia, with pale defiance, “there is no other explanation; she must herself have taken off the bonnet and the shawl.”

“Oh, yes,” murmured the vicar, as one who blenched before a dreadful thought; and a dreadful thought there was abroad amid that quiet company, talking, as it were, from one to another: the thought that the Countess Fanny had committed suicide, had deliberately cast herself into the ocean--had run down to the shore with that intention. Otherwise this absence was incomprehensible. She was not a fool; they all knew she was not a fool! Why should she have climbed down with difficulty and pain? For she must have had both difficulty and pain to scramble down the face of that cliff, merely to wander around wet rocks over which the foam was surging. It seemed an unlikely thing for even a daring, high-spirited girl to have done, and to have done alone and on a dark and stormy morning. Then, too, to take off her bonnet, however wet, and to cast aside her shawl, however soaked.… Why should she have done that, save that she was throwing aside an impediment to her own death? Easier to leap into the water without those encumbrances.…

Uneasy and still defiant, Ambrosia remarked:

“Perhaps the shawl and bonnet were torn from her when she was in the water, and cast up again.” And the others agreed, without conviction; each saying: “Perhaps--it may have been so,” or shaking their heads.

It was impossible for any of them to seize that dreadful thought and make it tangible. Besides, there was no reason why that bright young creature should have committed suicide. Why, of course, the idea was absurd! Rich and young and healthy and lovely? Of course, it was ridiculous! Lucius Foxe might know, and Oliver Sellar might know, that the Countess Fanny had a reason for destroying herself, and Ambrosia might horribly guess; but these people were without any clue that might lead them to such a dark conclusion. Therefore it passed for an accident--the young girl had been drowned.

No one asked the opinion of the fishers and the farmers, and what they said among themselves no one enquired. She had vanished--that was the hard fact against which all their speculations beat in vain--utterly vanished, in a way that no ordinary death could have made her seem to vanish. There was no fair body to look at once again, take farewell of; no solemn funeral scene of last adieux; she had gone as suddenly as she had come, and to many of them it seemed like an impossible dream, the whole episode, from the moment when she had stepped ashore from the ferry-boat, with her bright veil fluttering and her fantastic shawl clasped over her bosom, walking lightly, buoyantly, with her brilliant smile and her lovely face--alien to all of them; by most of them resented, by none of them liked. And now she had disappeared--in the minds of most, become like a vision.

“We can do nothing,” said Amy doggedly; “we must go on. She is a stranger to all of us, and we cannot spoil our lives because of it.” But she spoke in defiance, not only of the others, but of her own heart; for she knew, only too bitterly well, that nothing that the Countess Fanny could have done would have given her the importance her disappearance gave.…

Lucius was changed, and Oliver was like a man possessed. Both of them ignored her; even from her lover she received but a lame and perfunctory attention, and Oliver regarded her as a mere part of the machinery of the house. Both of them were absorbed, utterly absorbed, by the thought of the dead woman, by the wild quest to prove that she was not a dead woman. Ambrosia hardened herself. There was a debt owing to the living, she told her tormented heart. She would not remember that she might have been kinder--no, she would not let herself dwell on that, even in the lonely darkness of the stormy night, when the wind rushed and battled past her windows.

She had done what she could, she reminded herself with cold obstinacy. There was no use in making a heroine of the girl because she was dead. She had been light and obstinate, wilful and passionate--everything that Ambrosia detested and had been trained to avoid. She had caused malice and mischief. Whatever Oliver had done, he had not done anything to justify her flight to Lefton Park. Of that Ambrosia was sure. She could not speak of that last interview with Oliver; she did not dare. But she assured herself that it had been nothing so dreadful. The girl had exaggerated; the girl had indulged her temper, her wilful fury. Ambrosia had marked her when she was in a rage: a fury--that was what she was--a vixen!

Lucius had little indeed to say of that morning visit to his house. He declared that the Countess Fanny had come to see his father, having heard that the old man was ill; and that it not being possible for her to be admitted into the Earl’s presence, he had entertained her for a little while, and gone to order the carriage and equip himself to escort her back to Sellar’s Mead; but, while he had gone, she had disappeared. Mrs. Trefusis added her evidence. And when she told this secretly to Ambrosia, as she did on the occasion of that lady’s first visit to Lefton Park after the tragedy, she gave the whole episode a very different flavour.

“The young lady, ma’am,” said Mrs. Trefusis, with look and accent emphasising what she said, “was in a fair taking; she was wet through when she came here, and quite wild, though she spoke very haughty, and would take no hint from me, though that was an odd time for her to be calling. And she didn’t ask for the Earl, ma’am, but for Lord Vanden himself. And when I told her she could see neither, she pushed past me in a manner, and went into the drawing-room and found Lord Vanden for herself; and then she must change her shoes and stockings, and he in the room! I had to send the maid down with some. His lordship asked me himself. And she must demand breakfast, though she touched little of it, I will say.”

Ambrosia never gossiped with servants, even with such a servant as Mrs. Trefusis; but she did not refuse to listen to this, only salving her pride by making no comment on it. And when Mrs. Trefusis had finished her relation and mouthed over every scrap of evidence against the decorum and propriety of the Countess Fanny, Ambrosia merely said drily:

“She did not know our ways, Mrs. Trefusis. She had been allowed to go about very freely. I dare say she found nothing odd in coming over here that morning.”

“She must have known it was odd, ma’am, to ask for his lordship,” objected Mrs. Trefusis, with pursed lips. “That’s the same law in every country, I take it, ma’am; I’ve been abroad myself, and never heard any different--only that they was more strict than we are, begging your pardon, ma’am.”

“We must not criticise her,” said Ambrosia coldly. “She was our guest, and now she is dead.”

“But that doesn’t seem to be an end of her,” grumbled the housekeeper. “Everyone talks and thinks of nothing else. I’m sure I’m sick of it, like I am sick of the storm--again begging your pardon, ma’am!” But she knew that Ambrosia would not take offence at what she said; she knew that Ambrosia would understand that her words were meant for championship for herself. Mrs. Trefusis and a good many others sympathised more with Ambrosia than with the Countess Fanny. She, at least, was one of themselves. That was one great point in her favour. And she had been engaged to Lord Vanden before the Countess Fanny came. And that was another point in her favour, in the eyes of all the women, at least.

“She’ll never be found now,” sighed Ambrosia; “it is past reason to hope it.”

“Past reason to go on searching for her!” said Mrs. Trefusis drily. “And yet that’s what the gentlemen still do, day and night.”

“I know it,” replied Ambrosia. “My brother is obsessed. In all weathers, in all seasons, he must be abroad searching. Oh, Mrs. Trefusis! I sometimes feel as if I could not any longer endure it! Always this searching, day and night, hardly pausing to eat or sleep--I fear for his reason or his life!” She caught herself up, as if she were afraid of having already said too much, and asked hurriedly:

“Where is Lord Vanden now?”

“Out riding, ma’am,” replied Mrs. Trefusis grimly. “Riding up and down the coast.”

“Looking for her, I suppose,” said Ambrosia dully.

“Looking for her ghost, I should think you might say. That’s all he’ll meet now!”

“Why should her ghost come to him?” demanded Ambrosia. “Let us be quiet, Mrs. Trefusis; we talk wildly.”

“It’s enough to make anyone talk wildly,” replied the housekeeper.

“If the wind would only stop!” sighed Ambrosia. “Come, we must not talk any more. I will go upstairs and sit with the Earl till Lord Vanden returns.”

She went up the wide stairs slowly. This was to have been her house. Keenly had she counted on being mistress here; she knew all the pictures, all the tapestries, all the pieces of furniture, that yet remained to the impoverished estate of Lord Lefton. Why did a chill assail her as she thought of those expectations now? Nothing was altered, nothing was changed: in the spring she would marry Lucius. By the spring surely they would have forgotten the Countess Fanny. Not forgotten her--she caught herself up on that word. No, they would not have forgotten her, but by then they would be reconciled.

The old Earl had risen to-day, and was in his little favourite closet off the library. A small room, but it was the easiest to heat and light in this big, bare, draughty house, which did not possess much comfort in the winter.

He greeted Ambrosia with a real and tender affection. He could see how dreadful was her part in this, and he had noted, with a deep alarm, the change in Lucius since the Countess Fanny had disappeared.

He was arranging his rosy shells in boxes, placing the minute specimens in cotton wool, and when he saw Ambrosia, he paused at once in this occupation, and asked anxiously:

“No news?”

And Ambrosia replied:

“No news!” taking the chair opposite him, and languidly untying her bonnet-strings.

“I ought to give up asking that question,” said the old man. “It becomes foolish. How could there be any news, after nearly three weeks?”

“But they,” said Ambrosia with a pallid smile, “they will go on searching!”

“Yes,” said the old Earl, “yes; I think it is time they stopped. It will become a madness. The poor, poor creature has gone, and it were best to display some resignation. Have you told her relatives?” he asked.

Ambrosia shook her head.

“Oliver will have no one told. He is convinced that she is alive, and that he will find her. And of course he is wise--there is no need to raise an alarm or a scandal while there is the least possibility.”

“But is there,” asked the old man cautiously, “any longer the least possibility?”

Ambrosia shook her head.

“I do not think so, but Oliver will not be convinced.”

“Oliver must pull himself together,” said the old man. “Get him to come and see me, my dear--or Mr. Spragge. There is a point beyond which these things are lunacy. God help us all if Oliver gets beyond that point!”

“Yes, God help us all!” said Ambrosia. “For I do not think he can long preserve his sanity.”

“He was very fond of the girl,” said the old man in a shaking voice.

“Fond!” replied Ambrosia. “I do not know that that is the word. His feelings--” she paused--“one does not often speak of these things; but I do not think it was love that Oliver had for poor Fanny, but passion.”

“There should be no difference in the terms,” said the old man.

“But I believe there is,” said Ambrosia. “I believe he is not so much sorry for her death as furious that he has been cheated.”