Fear

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlour-maid, from the threshold, roused her with an inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a State secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering doubtfully on the threshold, as if in rebuke of such unconsidered assent; then her retreating steps sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall and went to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his usual measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus impelled, opened the library door.

Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him before the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her that he was not there.

She turned back to the parlour-maid.

‘Mr Boyne must be upstairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.’

Trimmle appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obedience and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid on her. The struggle resulted in her saying: ‘If you please, madam, Mr Boyne’s not upstairs.’

‘Not in his room? Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure, madam.’

Mary consulted the clock. ‘Where is he, then?’

‘He’s gone out,’ Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have put first.

Mary’s conjecture had been right, then; Boyne must have gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round to the court. She crossed the hall to the french window opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlour-maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out: ‘Please, madam, Mr Boyne didn’t go that way.’

Mary turned back. ‘Where did he go? And when?’

‘He went out of the front door, up the drive, madam.’ It was a matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.

‘Up the drive? At this hour?’ Mary went to the door herself and glanced across the court through the tunnel of bare limes. But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering.

‘Did Mr Boyne leave no message?’

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos.

‘No, madam. He just went out with the gentleman.’

‘The gentleman? What gentleman?’ Mary wheeled about, as if to front this new factor.

‘The gentleman who called, madam,’ said Trimmle resignedly.

‘When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!’

Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached enough to note in Trimmle’s eyes the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too hard.

‘I couldn’t exactly say the hour, madam, because I didn’t let the gentleman in,’ she replied, with an air of discreetly ignoring the irregular

ity of her mistress’s course.

‘You didn’t let him in?’

‘No, madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes –’

‘Go and ask Agnes, then,’ said Mary.

Trimmle still wore her look of patient magnanimity.

‘Agnes would not know, madam, for she had unfortunately burned her hand in trimming the wick of the new lamp from town’ – Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new lamp – ‘and so Mrs Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.’

Mary looked again at the clock. ‘It’s after two. Go and ask the kitchen-maid if Mr Boyne left any word.’

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought to her there the kitchen-maid’s statement that the gentleman had called about eleven o’clock, and that Mr Boyne had gone out with him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller’s name, for he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr Boyne.