A Young Man's Year by Anthony Hope

Author:Anthony Hope [Hope, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER XXI

IDOL AND DEVOTEE

After drinking his coffee quickly—with no word to anyone the while—Arthur had gone out of the room. Judith took up her book, Oliver Wyse was glancing at the City article in a weekly paper, Bernadette sat quiet in her high-backed arm-chair, looking very slight and young in her white evening frock, but wearing a tired and fretful expression. Just what she had planned to avoid, just what she hated, was happening or threatening to happen. She felt herself in an atmosphere of suspicion; she was confronted by accusers; she was made to witness her handiwork; the sight and the sound of the shattered edifice menaced her eyes and ears.

Glancing at her over his paper, Oliver saw that she was moody. He came and tried to draw her into talk. She received him coldly, almost peevishly. He had the tact not to press his company on her. "I think, if you'll excuse me, I'll go and polish off some letters. Then I shall be quite free for to-morrow," he said.

"Oh, yes, do, of course," she answered with what seemed relief. She was angry now with him for having come back to Hilsey, and with herself for having let him. "Will you go to the library?"

"You've given me such a delightfully comfortable room that I'll write there, I think."

"As you like, and—I'm very tired—perhaps we'd better say good-night."

He smiled and pressed her hand gently. "Very well, good-night." She gave him a glance half-penitent for her crossness, but let him go without more. Judith accorded him a curt 'Good-night,' without raising her head from her book. She was reading with wonderful industry; absorbed in the book! Bernadette interpreted this as a sign of disapproval—it was more probably a demonstration of non-responsibility for the ways of fate—but it was not Judith's disapproval that particularly engaged her thoughts. They were obstinately set on Arthur. How and what—how much—had he found out? Enough to make him resolved not to go to London, anyhow, it seemed! Enough to make him spring with swift suspicion to the conclusion that she wanted him to go for her own purposes! And yet she had been wary—and quite plausibly sage and prudent in her counsel.

"Where's Arthur?" she asked. "He's disappeared!"

"I don't know where he is," answered Judith from behind her book.

But he was more than suspicious. He was very angry. His last brusque speech showed that, and still more the note in his voice, a note which she had never heard before. It was of more than indignation; it was of outrage. She could manage the others. Margaret presented no difficulty, the sulky helpless husband hardly more; from Judith there was to be feared nothing worse than satiric stabs. But if Arthur were going to be like this, the next three days would be very difficult—and horribly distasteful. He had touched her as well as alarmed her. Such an end to her affectionate intimacy with him was a worse wound than she had reckoned on its being.

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