The Road that Led Home

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 124, 16 August 1927, Page 14

The Road that Led Home

By

E lizabeth York Miller.

Author of The House oj the Secret Conscience " A Cinderella ol Mayfair. ' £jr C . &c

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS (’HAPTBRS VIII. to X.—Mrs. Clayton enjoys her new status, but keeps her husband at arm's length. One Sunday morning Raymond meets Connover and Mrs. Gerald Methune, and these two invite themselves to lunch with the Claytons Informed by tier husband of the two guests Nora becomes excited, dresses with care in order to Impress them, but finds that both Connover and Mrs. Methune are quite weight enough for her. she takes Connover to her boudoir, and is once more overcome by the old glamour. She tries to hold her own, but Connover takes the wind out of her sails by telling her that, in the long ago, the curate. James Prester, interfered between them, and took a message to him, Connover, that Nora never wanted to see him again. To Nora's incredulity he replies, “Ask him.” A little later the Vicar of Riffmoor is taken ill and dies. The Claytons go to the funeral, and Nora stays on at the Vicarage to help her sister to straighten things out. Alison intends to carve out her own future. Nora visits James Prester in his little cottage. Jim comes to the door. He invites her in and she challenges him with the statement made to her by Connover. He is silent. CHAPTER XVIII. She was so fresh and appealing, so lovely in shimmering blue and silver, so delicately yet vitally alive, that Clayton’s heart misgave him. Would he betray his chivalrous resolutions? lie longed to stroke the alabaster smoothness of her arms; the slender column of her white throat invited kisses. She was his—yet not his; set apart from him by the coldness of her will, by the cruel indifference to the warm passion her beauty aroused. Although the round table at which they sat seemed small in that vast oak-panelled dining-room, a shining, mellow pool of light under the softly shaded candles, they looked at each other across it as from a great distance. More than the table separated them; secrets; each heart busy with its own. To-night, curionsly enough, there were none of those silences which had come to be an agony to them both. Nora talked brilliantly, like one of those desperate women of drama determined to fend off some tragic climax. She talked a great deal of nonsense about plays they had seen and books she had read recently, but somehow she made it seem brilliant nonsense. Clayton had read none of the books she mentioned and had yawned unhappily through most of the plays, but he made her a good audiHe looked intelligent; there were times when he seemed on the point of putting in a word, himself, but got no opportunity until the starchy butler gave them coffee and withdrew. Then he made his own opportunity. He was crude about it, as he was apt to be about everything. He leaned across at Nora, gesturing inelegantly with a fat cigar. “Wait a minute. There’s something I want to ask you before we go on to the subject of Grand Opera. I want to ask you where you were this afternoon—why you were so late?” It was final, definite—nothing subtle about it —just a blunt demand that would grossly have offended a true woman of the world. It had the effect of frightening Nofti, yet she tried to pretend that she was offended. She got up, resting her slender hands against the edge of the polished mahogany, and stared at him, white and haughty. “I —I felt that you were going to be horrid,” she stammered ineffectually. Clayton rose, also, and drowned his freshly lighted cigar in his coffee cup. “I merely asked you a question,” he said, his voice stubborn. “Will you answer it?”

“Certainly. I have been with Cora Methune all the afternoon. We —we had a lot to talk about and she dropped me on her way to the theatre.” Clayton stared at her, an expression of iron ugliness about his mouth and jaw. , “And—and thank you very much for insulting me.” Nora added with childish arrogance. Clayton said nothing and, after waiting a moment to give him a chance, Nora turned and went swiftly from the room. Upstairs it was so quiet that she seemed to hear her heart ticking like an excited clock. Her rooms were quite deserted. Lutie being at supper at this hour, and Nora’s fear of her husband grew until it became panic. Had Raymond believed her lie? But why not? And if he had doubted her, why hadn’t he pressed for further details? It was all so stupid, anyway; all over nothing, really. She calmed down a little, wrenched out of her fragile dinner dress and slipped on a teagown of white lace and fur. Then she went into her boudoir and arranged herself with a book and a cigarette in a cushioned divan by the fire. Raymond would come up presently—she thought she knew his moods —and then she would give him a soft look that would send him on to his knees beside her, hungry and grateful for even the privilege of kissing her hand. He did not come, however, and a little later —ringing for Lutie —Nora discovered that he had gone out. This was mystifying, but she returned to her divan and her cigarettes, the book dropped unheeded to the floor. Eleven, twelve o’clock. Nora nodded, drowsed a little, then sat up sharply as someone came into the room. It was only Lutie, again, but this time the maid brought a note which she announced had just been delivered by special messenger. Glancing at the envelope, Nora turned a little white. “Is the boy waiting?” she asked. “No, madam. James said there was no answer. “Very well. You can go to bed, now. I shan’t want you any more tonight.” “Thank you, madam.” Lutie glided from the room, stealthily aware of that something which proclaimed the atmosphere to be not quite normal. The envelope was addressed in Cora Methune’s writing, and the word “Immediate” had been 'added in the lower left-hand corner. Nora tore it open with feverish haste, and this is what she read: Awfully sorry, my dear, but Raymond himself called on me this afternoon, sg whatever you say you mustn’t tell him you were here. He’ll know better. Ring me up in the morning. In great haste to get this to you.— C.M. Nora’s lips parted, showing her white teeth in a ghastly little grimace. So when she told that lie, Raymond had recognised it for what it was. He would be justified in thinking the very worst of her, now. Definiteliy she had cast in her lot with the sorry women of this world who are not to be trusted. CHAPTER XIX. Just a little too late Nora realised that Connover's advice had been sensible, and by taking it she would have avoided such a pitfall as that into which she had fallen. But the lie, dragging in Cora Methune’s name to substantiate it, altered everything. No one could blame Raymond now for harbouring the cruellest suspicions.

He had warned her plainly that he did not care for her rather clandestine association with Connover, and she had flown in the face of his wishes. On top of that she had lied. Nora burned under the shame of that lie. The fact that her smallness was unmasked effected a curious change in her. Not often is it given for a human being to see him or herself in the true colours, but a shock can bring about such a thing. In that moment of shame Nora was given a blinding revelation of herself. A sort of moral house-cleaning was effected in one fell rush, as though some extra part of her stood aghast on the threshold of the place where dwelt her soul and was moved to make short shrift of its dusty disorder. . She sat down crushing her flaming face in her hands. The pettiness of her intrigue with Connover —it hadn’t even the quality of passion to excuse or dignify it — made her cringe. All the time she had known that she had neither the courage nor the desire to be one of the world’s great sinners. She had been playing at passion, fluttering prettily about a candle whose warmth and danger was as cold as a glow-worm's, fanning the super-red coals of a s? fireplace whose illusion didn’t deceive even the remotest gallery god. She would never have done any of the things which now might reasonably be suspected of her. One figure stood out clearly in the light of this self-reconstruction —that of Raymond Clayton, her husband; and associated with it was a vision of Watts’s heroic group of man and horse familiar to frequenters of Kensington Gardens. To a psycho-ana-lyst the corollary of ideas would have been self-evident, but to Nora it was puzzling. Why, in thinking of her husband, should she immediately think also of the colossal, boldy sculptured “Physical Energy'?” It explained, however, her feeling as regarded Clayton. His power and strength were as rugged, as overwhelming as that symbolised in the rough stone of the giant sculpture. It was not exactly ruthlessness—ye£ one who fell under the rearing hoofs of that horse could not hope to be spared; one who was held in the grasp of such muscled arms would certainly be crushed, while neither horse nor man might be conscious of what had happened. Nora’s spirit quailed before such terrific imagery. She no longer feared Raymond, but now she regarded him as the crack of doom. Love had made him weak in her hands, but hate would make him strong. She had seen that earlier m the evening when she told her lie, the slow hardening of mouth and chin as in a mould of iron. She would be but a tattered, soiled little wisp, a trumpery fragment of discarded finery blown on the cold gale of his disgust. Suddenly her head went up from its shamed weeping. Where, in the midst of all this painful imagery. stood Cora Methune? Would it be worth a quid pro quo to play Mrs. Methune against Connover when, or if, accusations were levelled 9 Raymond hadn’t mentioned calling r Cer that afternoon. Not a word from h .1, not even a hint, which would have made all the difference in the world. But Satan was admonished to the rear as regarded that subject. Nora knew that her husband was not ashamed of calling upon his old friend, that there had been no point in his failing to mention it. Indeed, he had been given no opportunity to mention anything until the butler left them alone at the end of the meal. It was now one o’clock and the unhappy Nora became as acutely conscious as ever Clayton had been of the still emptiness of the house. It breathed so silently that the whispering touch of her slippered feet on the floor seemed to waken clamorous echoes. The rainperliaps, had ceased. She went out into the corridor and looked down over the bronze balustrade into the marble well of the entrance hall. A pale blue light burned near the door, and very likely the night footman was somewhere in attendance, but he could not be seen. The light made everything look ghostly, unreal. With a faint shudder Nora went to the door of he rhusband’s bedroom.

listened for a moment, tried the handle, and finding that it turned, went in. The room was empty; the bed fiad'not been slept in. The white wraith, uneasy little ghost in lace and ermine, then trailed her weary way through the dressing room beyond and out again to the corridor, then down the wide sweep of marble stairway, a hand touching the cold bronze of the balustrade to balance her uncertain footsteps. The servant who should have been there was not in his snug little lodge at the side of the main entrance. Nora thought of ringing for him, then decided not to. He was probably in the butler’s pantry having his supper, or whatever meal he called it. There remained only the library where Raymond was likely to be, if he had returned. Ttiis was in the left wing. Lighted by two more of the ghostly blue globes, Nora made her way thither. She had no idea what she meant to say to her husband should she find him, but there was no necessity to worry about that, for he was not in the library. The embers of a dying fire glowed like a dull red eye out of the cavernous darkness until her trembling hand found an electric switch. Click! That threw only the top of the big flat-top-ped desk into a quiet pool of light, leaving the rest of the room in dusky shadow. Nora put some coal on to the fire, marvelling that it was necessary for her to do so menial a task—she, who scarcely more than a year ago had thought nothing of carrying a loaded scuttle from the Vicarage shed to the house. Then she came back to Clayton’s desk and stared at a photograph of herself, merely an enlarged snapshot which Alison had taken before marriage and JDangerfield House had become the portion of little Nora Mowbray, but Clayton had set it in a frame on his desk and preferred it to any of the Bond Street “studio portraits.” Often Nora had wondered why, but to-night she was beginning to understand her husband, and the sight of the old snapshot thus dignified, caused a slight contraction in her throat. “He cared for me,” she whispered to herself. Uneasily her glance shifted and fell upon the telephone. There was a subtle suggestion in the instrument. Perhaps, thought Nora, she had been led here for the purpose of making use of the thing. With every fibre of her being she loathed Connover, but it seemed necessary to call him up at this moment even if she woke him .out of sleep. The silence of the house had got on to her nerves, and she craved action of some sort to ease them. Conny should be told what had happened and if he began to be sarcastic about her stupidity she was in a mood to give him back as much as he gave her, and more. It wouldn’t be at all bad, either, if Raymond should happen to return opportunely and overhear her giving Conny an indignant piece of her mind. That, at least, would carry the ring of truth to him. She thought of Conny, of his pouting lips under the affected little moustache, of his fatuous eyes and his slender decadent hands that gestured so sparsely with a wealth of secret knowledge in the sensitive finger-tips. Conny was a product of the ages—nothing at all in himself. As a thin-blooded aristocrat he was superb, as a man he had the strength and moral stamina of a broken reed. Norah had never been to his bachelor chambers, which were in a rather splendid backwater off St. James’s Street, but she had rung him up before, and new his telephone number. As she sat down at Raymond’s desk, staring absently at the enlarged snapshot of herself, she reflected with some measure of outraged satisfaction that this would be the last time she’d ever ring Conny up, perhaps—if he was at home —the last time she’d hear his voice again. Well, she had no great regets on that score. It was great pity that their ways had crossed again after her marriage. She gave the number to exchange, then sat waiting, glancing over her shoulder at the shadowy door, drumming on the blotting-pad. (To be continued.)