Chapter XX

Lucius turned to Ambrosia with but a mechanical recognition.

“Forgive me!” he said absently. “I did not at once notice you.”

“No,” thought Ambrosia bitterly, “you do not notice if I am there or not! Your mind and your heart and your soul are too occupied with another woman.”

“Amy is very distressed,” remarked the old Earl, looking anxiously at his son. “All this is very difficult and terrible for her, Lucius; you must not forget that. In your search for one who is lost, you must not overlook one who is beside you. Your first duty,” added the old man deliberately, “is, after all, towards Amy.”

Lucius appeared startled by this, roused and bewildered. He glanced at his father, and then at the young woman, and seemed about to speak, but bit his lip and was silent.

Amy felt that this was a moment when she might with justice put in some plea for herself. After all, for nearly three weeks she had remained silent, always standing apart before the thought of the Countess Fanny. Now, surely, the time was ripe to rouse Lucius from this useless, hopeless obsession.…

“Need you search any more?” she asked, glancing timidly towards him. “Is there any good to be done by this, Luce? It is straining the nerves of all of us; at home I have Oliver, and when I come here there’s you… and nobody talks or thinks of anything else. Now, after three weeks, there cannot possibly be any hope.”

“Don’t remind me of that,” replied Lucius hoarsely. “Don’t say there can’t be any hope--there is, there must be!”

“Lucius, you talk wildly,” put in the Earl sternly. “It is not in any human probability that there is any hope left of finding Fanny now. You know that.”

“I won’t admit it,” insisted Lucius defiantly. “No, sir; I declare that I won’t admit it.”

“Why?” demanded Ambrosia.

“Because,” said the young man with difficulty, “it is too dreadful a thought. Surely, Amy, for you also it must be too appalling a reflection--the thought that she is dead, really _dead_!”

“It is horrible, of course,” agreed Amy; “a tragedy, and an unexpected one. But why should it be so appalling to either of us? Lucius, she was a stranger!”

The young man opened his lips as if to give a vehement denial to this statement, then put his fingers to his mouth and was silent, turning moodily away towards the fire. She noticed that he still wore his riding-coat, and that it was wet. Of late he had become very negligent in his attire; never before had she seen him carelessly dressed, but now he seemed indifferent as to his appearance. Out day and night on the cliffs, day and night out in the storm, his eyes so tired, his lips so strained, and the hollows in his cheeks perceptible to her as he stood there, with the firelight giving him a false colour.…

“You’ll make yourself ill,” she exclaimed impulsively, “and to no purpose! Oh, Lucius, forget her!”

“There comes a moment,” remarked the old Earl, kindly but firmly, “when reason must step in, or madness will follow.”

Lucius answered with his back to both of them, and his voice shook with passion.

“I won’t believe she’s dead.”

Ambrosia endeavoured to command her painful emotions at these words, to speak gently and even with sympathy.

“I won’t believe it either, Lucius. I’m praying for her every day--that she may be, by some miracle, somewhere, alive. But let us be calm about it. Cease this wild search! Listen, my dear, as your father says, to reason. How could she possibly be concealed anywhere now? How can you, by riding or tramping the fields and cliffs all day, hope to find her? Just think of it, Lucius--where could she be?”

“She’s got away, perhaps,” he said sullenly. “Got on to the mainland, somehow.”

“But you know,” said the Earl firmly, “we have made enquiries; hopeless and desperate as they were, we have made them; at Truro--beyond--even as far as London. It is out of the question, Lucius, to suppose that she has got away from St. Nite’s. Why, we know that no conveyance left the village that day. Oliver denied her a horse, and there was nowhere else she could get one. Besides, she would have been most conspicuous, even supposing she _had_ picked up a horse, a solitary woman on a day like that--dressed as she was dressed. It’s out of the question, Lucius; with all respect for your distraction, one must maintain some common sense.”

“If she were dead,” returned Lucius, “I think that I should know it.”

With an effort, Ambrosia allowed this to pass.

“I am going home now,” she murmured; “there is no object in my remaining here. You have nothing to say to me, I perceive, Lucius.”

“I will go back with you,” he said in a perfunctory manner. “I won’t come up to the house; I don’t wish to meet Oliver. He is too uncivil.”

“It is not meant personally to you,” said Ambrosia eagerly. “He has been like that ever since the tragedy; he is scarcely in his wits.”

“I do not think you should be left with him,” interposed the Earl. “It is too much for you, Amy; you will find your nerves giving way. You should come here; Mrs. Trefusis will make you comfortable.”

“But how can Oliver live there alone?” protested his sister. “It is impossible; he cannot look after himself. I doubt if the servants would remain, if I were not there, standing between them and him! No, my duty is to Oliver.”

She thought, even as she said the words, that too much of her life had been duty. Duty had been almost an indulgence with her; duty, and never anything else. Perhaps if she had not been so full of duty about her relations with Lucius, they would have been happier. She could recall now, and with an intense, bitter regret, that when they had first been betrothed he had urged her, in a wealth and hurry of feeling, to marry him then, and go away. There had been duty then--duty to Oliver, duty to the old Earl, duty to a sense of decorum, propriety. She had crushed down the feeling which had responded so eagerly to his. She had thwarted her own intense desire for escape; and where were they now? Staring at each other stupidly over the ashes of a dead affection!

“I am taking Mr. Spragge back with me,” she added dully. “I have asked him to come and speak to Oliver. We can’t go on like this. I shall send for a doctor, too. You know, when he had that last seizure, three weeks ago, Dr. Drayton thought he was in a dangerous state.”

“I’ll come with you,” repeated Lucius mechanically.

Ambrosia shook her head.

“I have the carriage,” she said. “Don’t inflict yourself with our company. Stay here with your father--he needs you. You look tired, Lucius, very tired.”

“No rest,” said the old man anxiously. “He will certainly make himself ill, but it is useless for me to talk. I wish the storm would cease; there is something in this incessant wind which is maddening to everyone. I hope Mr. Spragge can help you, my dear; he is a wise man, and when need be a brave one.”

Amy stooped, and allowed the old man’s trembling lips to kiss her cold cheek. Then she left the cabinet and went downstairs, followed by Lucius. They had to traverse the green drawing-room, and there she paused; and Lucius must pause too, though he shivered in doing so, for the last time he had been through this room with a woman he had been with the Countess Fanny, and he must recall that now, and seem to see her radiant, vivid figure there beside him, instead of the sombre personality of Ambrosia, in her dark dress and black veil and bonnet, which was like half mourning; for it had seemed to Amy only suitable to wear a half mourning since the disappearance of her young cousin.…

“Lucius,” she said now earnestly. “Will you not speak to me candidly? Your father asked me only just now what you had told me of this last interview with Fanny; and what could I say--for you have told me nothing.”

“There was nothing to tell,” he muttered, looking past her and out on to the wild prospect of the park, across which he still seemed to see that buoyant figure hurrying away into the void.

“Let us leave that excuse!” said Ambrosia, in a quiet voice of resignation. “Mrs. Trefusis knows that she was here over half an hour. Something must have passed in that time; your father thinks so, and so do I. Oh, Lucius, won’t you tell me? We are supposed to be going to be married in the spring, and there is no confidence between us.”

Lucius moved to the window, and put his brow against the window-pane and stared down on the ground, so that his back was towards Amy.

“She asked me,” he said, speaking slowly and with difficulty, “to save her from Oliver; that was all there was in it, Amy. She said that she could no longer support Oliver, and that she was frightened of him; and I----”

“And you sent her away,” said Ambrosia.

“Don’t force me to repeat it,” he cried. “I urged her to return to Sellar’s Mead.…”

“And you did right,” replied Ambrosia quickly; “of course you did right. Why should you reproach yourself with that, Luce!”

“Why?” he asked bitterly. “Because I sent her to her doom; that is why. Don’t you see it, Amy? She wouldn’t go back--she preferred to die.”

“That is all very high-flown,” said Ambrosia impatiently, “and all impossible, too. The girl must have been half out of her wits if she destroyed herself on so slight a thing as that. Oliver----”

“Yes, don’t tell me about Oliver,” interrupted Lucius. “I don’t care to think about it. She said very little to me, but since she has gone away I have thought about it a great deal. I acted like a fool and a coward, and abandoned her when she had appealed to me; and sometimes I think, Amy, that I can’t go on living much longer with that thought in my mind.”

“Cast it out, then,” urged Ambrosia, coming up behind him and touching his unresponsive arm. “Put it out of your mind--don’t consider it any more; for it is folly… the girl had nothing to fear from Oliver.”

“Don’t continue speaking of her as ‘the girl,’” said Lucius, nervously and irritably.

“What am I to call her, then? She was a stranger to me.”

Then Lucius did turn and look at her, with reproachful eyes, and said what the Earl had said upstairs in his little closet; but did not say it with the same temperance and kindness:

“Oh, Amy! Couldn’t you have saved her? Did you want to stand by and allow that to happen? It seems incredible; you must have known, you must have guessed--you, another woman, and living in the same house with her--could you not have seen to what a pass she was being driven?”

Ambrosia closed her eyes. A deep chill pervaded her whole frame.

“I did what I could,” she replied, forming the words even while thinking what a commonplace and stale excuse that was. “I never realised anything was happening that she could take so seriously. I still don’t think that Oliver did anything or threatened anything that could have driven her to extremities.”

Lucius put his hand to his forehead with a touch of weariness.

“No use our discussing it,” he said. “I am sick of words; I am sick of everything.”

“It ought not to spoil our lives,” ventured Ambrosia, in sinking tones. “You might think a little of me, Lucius. What did your father say just now--that your first duty was to me?”

But as she heard her own words echo in the large room, she knew how hopeless, how bitterly useless, it was to remind anyone of a detested duty; and that was what she had become to Lucius--a detested duty.

“Yes, yes,” said the young man hastily. “I know it must be difficult for you, and I understand. I will try to put it out of my mind.” But the very way in which he said these words showed that he would never be able to put the Countess Fanny out of his mind.

“You ought to have no remorse on her account,” urged Ambrosia. “I wish I could make you understand that. If anyone should feel remorse, it is Oliver; and even in his case I think it is unnecessary. She had only her own wilful temper to blame.”

“Don’t censure her,” cried Lucius hotly. “I’ll not endure that, Amy. There was nothing wrong in her--nothing; it was we--we were all wrong from the first.”

Ambrosia could not altogether resist a reply to this, although she softened the instinctive fierceness of that reply.

“I suppose, then, Fanny had a right to be a flirt and a rattle and a featherhead?” she remarked. “Playing fast and loose with Oliver, with first her ‘Yes’ and then her ‘No’!”

There was a silence. Ambrosia did not wish to break that silence. Yet she found herself saying, almost against her own volition:

“Unless you know of some reason, Lucius, why she should have changed her mind.”

Lucius did not speak.

“Perhaps,” continued Amy, “it dates from that day when she met you--when you were together in the churchyard. That seems the beginning of it. Perhaps, Lucius, you know something about it after all.”

He spoke now, and stubbornly.

“I know nothing about it whatever,” he declared.

“Then why should she tease your conscience?”

“Because I was the last to see her,” said the young man hurriedly. “Because I had the responsibility of sending her away.…”

Ambrosia could say no more. She also felt weary; weary to faintness.

“Good-bye, Lucius,” she said abruptly, and left him; nor did he make any effort to follow her, and when she looked back to the door he was still standing there, leaning against the high window-frame and staring out across the wintry prospect of the park.

She entered her brougham, and the horses proceeded slowly on the wet road to the vicarage; and there she found Mr. Spragge waiting for her. He stepped into the carriage beside her, and they turned back to Sellar’s Mead.

Ambrosia sat mute in her corner, wondering how far she should confess to the clergyman the true state of affairs. Very likely he knew everything. Very likely everyone in the village knew everything! But did it do to put all this into words, even to him? Pride and prudence alike forbade. She would not reveal her heart. The heart of Oliver he would soon see for himself.

She even endeavoured to put matters upon a plain and practical footing, by laying her gloved hands on the old man’s knee, as they proceeded down darkening roads with the windy trees blown to and fro above their heads on the high fields, and saying:

“Dear sir, I fear greatly for Oliver! This tragedy has almost overturned his brain. He is not in any manner normal, and I scarcely care to be alone with him at Sellar’s Mead--alone, that is, with the servants. They are, you now, all terrified of him.”

“You should have a companion,” said Mr. Spragge anxiously; “someone must come and stay with you, if you cannot induce him to go away. That would be the best of all--if he were to leave St. Nite’s Head.”

“But that,” said Ambrosia mournfully, “is the last thing he will do. He is as if chained to the spot, rooted to the ground. Nothing will induce him to abandon this piece of earth where she disappeared.”

“If her body could only have been found,” said the clergyman gravely; “if we could have laid that at rest, we might have laid at rest the demon that possesses your brother.”

“The demon!” replied Ambrosia, startled at that word.

“It seems to me, Miss Sellar, that it is no less; a disappointed and an outraged demon possesses your brother, and we must do our best to lay it. The event has been dire, the shock great; but nevertheless it must be met with Christian resignation and fortitude, or disaster will ensue.”

“That is what I am afraid of,” shivered Ambrosia, huddled in the corner of the darkened interior of the carriage, “disaster--I seem to feel it in the very air I breathe, and oh, this tempest, this endless tempest.…”

“It is no more,” said Mr. Spragge heavily, “than we get every winter; but now, of course, it seems more appalling, with this tragedy so fresh in our minds.”

As they approached Sellar’s Mead--Ambrosia could see it from the window when she leant forward--she turned again to her companion, and asked, with a fresh access of dread and terror:

“You can stay with us to-night, dear sir, can you not?”

Mr. Spragge replied that he could stay that night, and other nights if necessary; there was no one who had greater need of him in his small parish, and one or two good neighbours had offered to go and stay with his wife.

“We are really very cosy and comfortable in the village,” he said, “for all the tempests and storms; and while I can be of any use to you, Miss Sellar, I will remain here.”

The darkness had almost closed in as they passed through the gates of Sellar’s Mead, and the wind was rising higher for another night of angry elements and dreadful weather.

Ambrosia thought with horror of Luce; standing there alone, in that empty, cold drawing-room, staring out upon that empty, cold park, thinking of Fanny.… She ought to have been with him, not with Oliver; yet it had been impossible for her to stay, for he did not want her, and she could bring him no manner of comfort.…

She preceded Mr. Spragge into the parlour. Everything here looked cheerful and radiant enough. The lamps were already lit, the fire was sparkling on the hearth, the mahogany gleaming in these varied lights, every picture in place, seats drawn up round the fire, cushions and easy chairs, and even a bowl of hot-house exotics, Roman hyacinths and tuber-roses and violets, standing in a glass vase on the little _papier mâché_ table, filling the warm air with an elegant perfume. Nothing had been neglected; there was no hint here of a ravaged or desolate household.

Mr. Spragge commended Amy for her good management.

“You, at least, have not let shock and grief get the better of you, my dear. You have shown some courage and resignation”; and Amy wanted to cry aloud, “But I do not love her, and those two men do.”

But she smiled, and answered the old man’s compliment with some amiable comment, and sat down, and took up her work-basket and opened it, and stared into the padded satin lining, and selected a thimble painted with a wreath of roses and cupids, and a little pair of gilt scissors, and idly turned these small objects over in her gloved hands; and then put them back again, and said, with a start:

“What am I doing--I haven’t taken my outdoor clothes off! Will you, sir, excuse me for a moment?”

The old man said:

“Of course, my dear, of course; I am very comfortable here! And where is your brother?”

Amy jerked the long wool-embroidered bell-pull, and Julia came at once.

“Where is your master?” demanded Ambrosia.

And Julia answered that the master was still abroad; dark as it was, he had not yet returned.

“This must be stopped,” muttered Mr. Spragge. “He will meet his death one of these nights, out in a storm like this, along those dangerous cliffs.”

“Every night the same,” said Ambrosia dully.