had a pretty useful night’s rest myself,” he observed.
Mangan raised his eyeglass and gazed at his host’s throat.
“Cut yourself?” he queried.
“Razor slipped,” Dominey told him. “You get out of the use of those things in Africa.”
“You’ve managed to give yourself a nasty gash,” Mr. Mangan observed curiously.
“Parkins is going to send up for a new set of safety razors for me,” Dominey announced. “About our plans for the day,—I’ve ordered the car for two-thirty this afternoon, if that suits you. We can look around the place quietly this morning. Mr. Johnson is sleeping over at a farmhouse near here. We shall pick him up en route. And I have told Lees, the bailiff, to come with us too.”
Mr. Mangan nodded his approval.
“Upon my word,” he confessed, “it will be a joy to me to go and see some of these fellows without having to put ‘em off about repairs and that sort of thing. Johnson has had the worst of it, poor chap, but there are one or two of them took it into their heads to come up to London and worry me at the office.”
“I intend that there shall be no more dissatisfaction amongst my tenants.”
Mr. Mangan set off for another prowl towards the sideboard.
“Satisfied tenants you never will get in Norfolk,” he declared. “I must admit, though, that some of them have had cause to grumble lately. There’s a fellow round by Wells who farms nearly eight hundred acres—”
He broke off in his speech. There was a knock at the door, not an ordinary knock at all, but a measured, deliberate tapping, three times repeated.
“Come in,” Dominey called out.
Mrs. Unthank entered, severer, more unattractive than ever in the hard morning light. She came to the end of the table, facing the place where Dominey was seated.
“Good morning, Mrs. Unthank,” he said.
She ignored the greeting.
“I am the bearer of a message,” she announced.
“Pray deliver it,” Dominey replied.
“Her ladyship would be glad for you to visit her in her apartment at once.”
Dominey leaned back in his chair. His eyes were fixed upon the face of the woman whose antagonism to himself was so apparent. She stood in the path of a long gleam of morning sunlight. The wrinkles in her face, her hard mouth, her cold, steely eyes were all clearly revealed.
“I am not at all sure,” he said, with a purpose in the words, “that any further meeting between Lady Dominey and myself is at present desirable.”
If he had thought to disturb this messenger by his suggestion, he was disappointed.
“Her ladyship desires me to assure you,” she added, with a note of contempt in her tone, “that you need be under no apprehension.”
Dominey admitted defeat and poured himself out some more coffee. Neither of the two noticed that his fingers were trembling.
“Her ladyship is very considerate,” he said. “Kindly say that I shall follow you in a few minutes.”
Dominey, following within a very few minutes of his summons, was ushered into an apartment large and sombrely elegant, an apartment of faded white and gold walls, of chandeliers glittering with lustres, of Louise Quinze furniture, shabby but priceless. To his surprise, although he scarcely noticed it at the time, Mrs. Unthank promptly disappeared. He was from the first left alone with the woman whom he had come to visit.
She was sitting up on her couch and watching his approach. A woman? Surely only a child, with pale cheeks, large, anxious eyes, and masses of brown hair brushed back from her forehead. After all, was he indeed a strong man, vowed to great things? There was a queer feeling in his throat, almost a mist before his eyes. She seemed so fragile, so utterly, sweetly pathetic. And all the time there was the strange light, or was it want of light, in those haunting eyes. His speech of greeting was never spoken.
“So you have come to see me, Everard,” she said, in a broken tone. “You are very brave.”
He possessed himself of her hand, the hand which a few hours ago had held a dagger to his throat, and kissed the waxenlike fingers. It fell to her side like a lifeless thing. Then she raised it and began rubbing softly at the place where his lips had fallen.
“I have come to see you at your bidding,” he replied, “and for my pleasure.”
“Pleasure!” she murmured, with a ghastly little smile. “You have learnt to control your words, Everard. You have slept here and you live. I have broken my word. I wonder why?”
“Because,” he pleaded, “I have not deserved that you should seek my life.”
“That sounds strangely,” she reflected. “Doesn’t it say somewhere in the Bible—‘A life for a life’? You killed Roger Unthank.”
“I have killed other men since in self-defence,” Dominey told her. “Sometimes it comes to a man that he must slay or be slain. It was Roger Unthank—”
“I shall not talk about him any longer,” she decided quite calmly. “The night before last, his spirit was calling to me below my window. He wants me to go down into Hell and live with him. The very thought is horrible.”
“Come,” Dominey said, “we shall speak of other things. You must tell me what presents I can buy you. I have come back from Africa rich.”
“Presents?”
For a single wonderful moment, hers was the face of a child who had been offered toys. Her smile of anticipation was delightful, her eyes had lost that strange vacancy. Then, before he could say another word, it all came back again.
“Listen to me,” she said. “This is important. I have sent for you because I do not understand why, quite suddenly last night, after I had made up my mind, I lost the desire to kill you. It is gone now. I am not sure about myself any longer. Draw your chair nearer to mine. Or no, come to my side, here at the other end of the sofa.”
She moved her skirts to make room for him. When he sat down, he felt a strange trembling through all his limbs.
“Perhaps,” she went on, “I shall break my oath. Indeed, I have already broken it. Let me look at you, my husband. It is a strange thing to own after all these years—a husband.”
Dominey felt as though he were breathing an atmosphere of turgid and poisoned sweetness. There was a flavour of unreality about the whole situation,—the room, this child woman, her beauty, her deliberate, halting speech and the strange things she said.
“You find me changed?” he asked.
“You are very wonderfully changed. You look stronger, you are perhaps better-looking, yet there is something gone from your face which I thought one never lost.”
“You,” he said cautiously, “are more beautiful than ever, Rosamund.”
She laughed a little drearily.
“Of what use has my beauty been to me, Everard, since you came to my little cottage and loved me and made me love you, and took me away from Dour Roger? Do you remember the school chidden used to call him Dour Roger?—But that does not matter. Do you know, Everard, that since you left me my feet have not passed outside these gardens?”
“That can be altered when you wish,” he said quickly. “You can visit where you will. You can have a motor-car, even a house in town. I shall bring some wonderful doctors here, and they will make you quite strong again.”
Her large eyes were lifted almost piteously to his.
“But how can I leave here?” she asked plaintively. “Every week, sometimes oftener, he calls to me. If I went away, his spirit