Fear

‘No; none. Have you?’ she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added stress of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then, inconsequently, turned back with it towards the lamp.

‘Lord, no! I only meant,’ he explained, with a faint tinge of impatience, ‘is there any legend, any tradition as to that?’

‘Not that I know of,’ she answered; but the impulse to add, ‘What makes you ask?’ was checked by the reappearance of the parlour-maid, with tea and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her husband’s face. He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The longer she looked the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The lines of tension had vanished, and such traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort. He glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

‘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.’