The Road that Led Home

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 125, 17 August 1927, Page 14

The Road that Led Home

'IBu

Elizabeth York Miller

Author o / The House oJ the Secret Conscience " 4 Cinderella ol Way/atr." *c <Sc

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS CHAPTERS VIII. to X.—Mrs. Clayton enjoys her new status, but keeps her husteind 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 ner 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. Later 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 XX. There was rather a long interval of that waiting, but just as she was ex • pecting the familiar, “No reply; will you repeat the number, please,” a man’s voice answered her—a familiar voice, somehow, reminding her of her father’s, but it was not Connover’s. “Hello! Who is calling?” “Is this Mayfair, 765?” Nora asked, thinking that she had been given a wrong number. “Yes—it is.” (That mystifying voice—that clergy - man’s voice. Whose?) “I wish to speak to Lord Connover, please,” said Nora. There was a little pause and a slight cough. Then; “I am sorry, but Lord Connover cannot come to the telephone. Will you give a message?” Nora hung up the receiver abruptly, without replying. She had recognised the voice, now. That nervous little cough told her whom it belonged to, that James Prester had been speaking to her from Conny’s rooms. She was confused to the point of acute embarrassment, yet vitally alert to some new and unforeseen sense of danger. It seemed to her that Jim could only be there because of her, and her imagination took quick strides to cover the path that had led him. The signposts on that path were Bessie Adams and Alison.

Nora was now as angry with Jim as she was with Connover. Too many people were interesting themselves in her affairs; indeed, the whole universe seemed to be ringing out the glad tidings of tea for two in a backalley shop. But why hadn’t Conny answered the telephone himself? Nora was dallying uneasily with that queston when a sharp quick step in the corridor sent her breathless to her feet. Raymond had come home. Obviously Clayton had not expected to find his wife waiting for him in the library. He came in briskly, with a tread that sounded satisfaction, his soft hat and overcoat dripping and a very bedraggled and curiously cowed-look-ing little dog at his heels. At sight of Nora he stopped abruptly, swept off his hat with a gesture which sprayed much Imoisture, and said coldly—“ Oh—you!” The little dog flattened himself, whined, looked up appealingly at his master and beat the stump of his tail on the floor. “It’s all right, Scotty,” Clayton said in a reassuring undertone. “We’re done with that sort of dirty business

for to-night. Our happy home is quite tidy for the moment.” He spoke in a savagely pleased way and with a double meaning—one for the dog and one for Nora. She took a step toward him and the little dog whined again. “Be careful,” Clayton admonished. “He might fly at you. I’ve had a little trouble with him this evening.” “Why—what?” Nora asked incoherently. She had seen her husband angry before, but this mood of savage pleasure was terrifying. “You lied to me at dinner, didn't you?” he said, more as a statement of fact than a question. She was silent and he added: “Don’t do it again. Next time something serious might happen.” “Raymond, will you let me try to explain?” she pleaded, holding out her hands. “It isn’t necessary,” he replied curtly. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a little leather whip with a snaky, braided thong, whereat the dog gave a short howl that was like a discordant bleat. “Shut up, you!” Clayton exclaimed. “Anybody’d think ” “My God, you’ve been beating the dog!” Nora cried, starting back with horror. Her quick apprehensive glance caught sight of dark stains on the whip. “Not Scotty,” Clayton replied significantly. “Beating a dog—yes. But not old Scotty.” He crossed to the fireplace and threw the dog-leash on to the glowing coals where it writhed and twisted like a snake in death agony. “The performance got on to Scotty’s nerves, that’s all,” he added. Nora drew in her breath as painfully as though a ton weight pressed gainst her bosom. Her eyes, fearstricken, sought Clayton’s. In the shadowed room they stood looking steadily at each other for an appreciable moment. There were flecks like gold-dust in the curious green of his eyes, little pin-point glitters that told a tale of triumph, of anger fed; a satisfied expression, almost a merry one. It was the nearest Raymond Clayton ever came to showing primitive, animal content. “Yes, Nora, I gave your ambitious young friend a good hiding. He needed it. Not for what he did, exactly, but for what was in his unclean mind, and for making a liar out of my wife. That was too much for me. Now go to bed, my child, and if you still say your prayers, thank God that it’s unlikely you’ll ever be troubled again by that miserable little mountebank. He won’t bother you—or me, either. I think I’ve settled his hash for him.” Unconscious that she made a detour to give wide berth to the uncompromising bulk of her husband, Nora moved swiftly and silently to the door. A dozen conflicting impulses fought in her breast, but she could express none of them. She was hurt and humiliated, a little proud with it, too, tingling with strange desires, frightened and angry. Thsre was a harsh, salty taste on her lips as though she had drunk brine, and her eye-lids smarted. Clayton had brought realism into the play-acting of her life. It was as though she had been cast naked upon that stage where she had postured so long in the tinsel and velvet of mummery. She glided away, bearing her humiliation and tingling desires with her, out into the ghostly blue lights of the marble corridors, and up to her

bedroom where she locked the door, but did not pray. Darkness shrouded Nora, and she was a little comforted by its velvety touch. She lay in her bed and ran her Angers lightly over her face with little shuddery trickles. That snaky whip writhing and twisting in the flames! Raymond must have struck Conny across the face with it. It had drawn blood. She tried to imagine what had led up to that scene. There must have Deen hot words, indeed. Raymond probably hadn’t intended hadn’t meant to do such a thing. But Conny's sneering insolence would have goaded him on, and the fact of having Scotty’s lead in his pocket did the rest. What could Conny have said? Then suddenly Nora found herself sitting up in bed with the soft feel of that velvety darkness all around her. It palpitated now with half-fluid forms that seemed to swing and sway, bumping silently into each other and reacting clumsily like half-deflated balloons. The room was alive with bogies of the dark. Frantically she sought for the switch of her bedside lamp, and almost knocked the lamp over before she found it. Light banished the bulbous horrors, but it could not drive away thought.

She had never been so miserable in all her life before, not even when she seemed to be no more than a disembodied head on the pillow in the room with the painted ceiling in Riffe Castle. In fact she hadn’t been miserable at all. then. There had appeared to be no future worth worrying about. Such absurd complications entangled this business. There was, for instance, James Prester. It was fairly understandable, now, why Conny hadn’t been able to come to the telephone, but that didn’t explain Jim’s presence in his rooms. Had Jim witnessed the scene between Raymond and Conny? What had it all been about, anyway? Surely, if ever, this was literally “a storm in a teacup,” but although Nora was not very clever she* was still intelligent enough to know that all big things are built by a multitude of little things, a heaping together one on top of another, a studied adding-to that makes the sum complete. So it was impossible to say how far-reaching that teacup storm might be, into what monstrous gale it might develop. Sometime during the small hours of morning, Nora slept. One moment she was wide awake and the next her eyelids drooped, fluttered with a sticky heaviness, and refused to lift again. She slept without dreams, exhausted in brain and body. * * * Everything was so very ordinary when she woke up that except for a feverish sense of fatigue, it would seem to Nora that nothing at all had happened to her. Yet to-day was not in the least like yesterday. Only 24 hours ago she had reclined on these same pillows, sipped tea brought by Lutie, looked through her letters and given herself up to a day-dream in which Connover figured as the hero. Yesterday she had been filled with a secret zest for her rendezvous with Connover and had thought of Raymond—when his presence forced her to a consideration of him—with cold scorn and distaste. To-day there was a difference in her feelings, but they could not be analysed as easily as those of yesterday. It wasn’t because Raymond had beaten Conny with a dog-whip that she felt differently. * That was a brutal act which the civilised Nora could not applaud. The change had begun before, and unmistakably it had something to do with Bessie Adams’s ill-timed appearance from the other side of that high oak screen. What was it that she had to do the first thing this morning? Oh, yes! A quivering little smile hovered on Nora’s lips as she recalled Cora Methune’s suggestion about ringing up. There was no necessity for that now. Lutie, filled with that quiet competence which distinguishes early mid-dle-age, was methodically laying out fresh underwear, inspecting each garment with a swiftly practised eye for any small fault which might have escaped her attention before. Nora’s engagements that morning began with a dressmaker’s appointment at a quarter to 12. She had dropped the habit lately of accompanying Raymond and Scotty on their after breakfast ' constitutional, and this was not quite

the time to pick it of seeing Raymond afraiJ 11 * W feeling pf faintness. TherP Kav ‘ ' that they ought to srfv ,„ Wa * »o 1 and they would probahi,. ***>l m2? Lutie went out ofthe 45 WaShT ent and then came back ,!? 11 “4* other servants with , ' 0n * mysterious* signal,*,' $ Lutie coughed ’** delivered the message W v Uslv »»* earth is equal to hiding , . 'kill domestic lute from on» ? . *s* *0 tS familiars. Lutie knew ~ everyone else who worked®? 50 *5 in Dangerneld House, that ,v° r *•<*.. and mistress of that ex£LS** lishment were not on cTd t *»Uk'. cSi.gh° ther - H—j and see him in the library for e /" I ''''! i | ents?" J lur * few a,,,; Although Lutie had been in Pans she was not a | except by tradition. ai,da„ 0Q » [nothing of Gallic softness inT *=•> compromising speech <she i," er k what was coining for'a long **' in her heart of hearts Umt ' «ts Mr. Clayton would soon ttt: little wife in her proper P mL h J“ rightly speaking was under his' Secretly. Lutie took an old‘P a ® pleasure in Nora's start of amJS* ! Sion, although she was fonr?™? 0 ' pretty mistress in a grjd'eie. ot **• way. A Hash of insight >4°" the two. Nora knew that builTS" she was made acutely uncomforuw? this command to Raymond's n4.' ! but she endeavoured to throw ' 5 " Of independence into her reply. ®* ! "Oh. certainly. But tell M r that I'll have to keep him wait^ Sl . : a few minutes. “ te "Very good, madam.” Nora jumped out of bed with vous alacrity, but after that she 4®' died, both for Lutie's sake and fot!' hope that Raymond would get ; ient and go off to his office J2f : ' j "iving her that extra special ,45 I she felt sure he had up his sleeve But even the most skilfully deb, toilette must end sometime and Nora had no further excuse for W ing. She went down to the library to her husband. Clayton was standing with his h. to the fireplace smoking one o[ a strong cigars he favoured. In J? of the ducal valet’s best, efforts he E a rather rumpled look and in shoo" ing out his arms—an unconscir' trick of habit —his wrists usuallv played more cuff than maseufcfashion decrees. Such a big man * bound to be uncomfortable in Lclothes. Even the most of tailors could never quite make k allowance for Raymond Clayton. It was this sense of his bigness why had lately come to burden Nora wa feeling of her own futility. It was merely a matter of his burstiiife ou* his clothes. Mentally one lived unde the shadow of a mountain which c amount of Biblical faith could remove “Just this —” he said, in his abrup casual way. "I thought I’d better tc you I’m putting this house into t. market to-day. Selling it, you under stand. We’ll have to be getting o before long. You see, it’ll be a force: sale.” Not a word about last night k somehow there seemed to be a situs--connection between this extraordinar statement and what had happened yesterday. “Have you—have you lost your money?” Nora asked bleakly. Clayton laughed and lit anotfcr match for his cigar although it va> burning quite well and did not n«d such attention. “Not yet. but I’m going to—if I htvt any luck,” he replied. “If I have any luck.” The wom ; repeated themselves in Nora's brain : some time after Clayton had bidd-r: her an abrupt bood-bye and tat: himself citywards. What precisely had he meant bthem? Surely no man could be sac a fool as to want to lose his men particularly when rumour credithim with possessing such a lot of i: From almost anyone except Raymond the expression would have sounds peevish, an exhibition of bad temjx: coupled with bad manners, like a eL; throwing away his toys. (To be continued)