CHAPTER XIII

THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM
‘
Ir was that discomfort to man, that cruelty to beast, that outrage by unnatural Nature upon all her children, a bitter summer’s day. The wind was in the east; great swollen clouds wallowed across the sky, now with- -out a drop, now breaking into capricious showers of stinging rain; and a very occasional burst of sunlight served only to emphasise the evil by reminding one of the season it really was, or should have been, even if it did not entice one to the wetting which was the sure reward of a walk abroad. The Delverton air was strong and bracing enoizh, but the patron wind of the district bit to the bone through garments never intended for winter wear.
On such a day there could be fe nore undesirable abodes than Normanthorpe House, with its marble floors, its high ceilings, and its general scheme of Italian coolness and discomfort. It was a Tuesday, when Mr, Steel usually amused himself by going on "Change in Northborough and lunching there at the Delverton Club. Rachel was thus not only physically chilled and
154
THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM 155
depressed, but thrown upon her own society at its worst ;
and she missed that of her husband more than she was aware,
of identifica- Mrs. Minchin
grown into for Rachel Steel. She was being punished for her second marriage as she had been punished for her first, only more deservedly, and with more subtle stripes,
hour of utter recklessness and desperation. Rachel was not mistress in her own house, nor did she feel for & moment that it was her own house at all. Every. thing Waa done for her; @ skilled housekeeper settled the einallest details ; and that these were perfect alike GiFangement and execution, that the said house- ssepet Waa § Woinan of irreproachable tact and cape. bility, And that she herself had never an
186 THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
grievance in Rachel's mind. She had not felt it at first.
She had changed in these summer months. She wanted
to be more like other wives. There was Morna Wood-
gate, with the work cut out for every hour of her full
= days ; but Morna had not made an anomalous Morna had married for love.
And to-day there was not even Morna to come and see her, or for her to go and see, for Tuesday after- noon was not one of the few upon which the vicar’s wife had no settled duty or occupation in the parish. Rachel so envied her the way in which she helped her husband in his work; she had tried to help also, in a desultory way ; but it is one thing to doa thing because it is a duty, and another thing to do it for something to do, as Rachel soon found out. Besides, Hugh Woodgate was not her husband. Rachel had the right feeling to abandon those half-hearted attempts at personal recreation in the guise of good works, and the courage to give Morna her reasons; but she almost regretted it this afternoon.
She had explored for the twentieth time that strange treasury known as the Chinese Room, a state apart- ment filled with loot brought home from the Flowery Land by a naval scion of the house of Normanthorpe, and somewhat cynically included in the sale. The idols only leered in Rachel’s face, and the cabinets of grotesque design were unprovided with any key to their history or former uses, In sheer desperation Rachel betook herself to her husband’s study ; it was the first
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THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM 187
time the had crossed that threshold in his absence, but within were the books, and » book
she must have.
These also had been purchased with the house, With few exceptions, they were ancient books in battered calf, which Steel had stigmatised as “musty trash” once when Rachel had asked if she might take one. She had not made that request again ; indeed, it was seldom enough that she had set foot inside the spacious room which the old Looks lined, and in which the master of the house disliked being disturbed. Yet it was any- thing
but trash which she now discovered upon the dusty shelves,
rare folios; at every
books worth taking out. But this was almost all that Rachel did ; she took
sufficiently attracted to march off with them, The quaint obsolete type of the various volumes attracted her more as a curiosity than as readable print ; the coarse satires of the early masters of caricature and cartoon did not attract her at all. Rachel's upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the superstitions, and the shibbo- leths which are at once a strength avd a weakness of
1588 THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
the ordinary English education ; if, however, she was too much inclined to take a world’s masterpiece exactly as she found it, her taste, such as it was, at all events was her own.
- She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open now ; it was full and running over with the mysteries and the perplexities of her own environment. Books would not take her out of herself; in them she could not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within problems which beset and tortured her. So she ran her hand along the dusty books, little dreaming that the key was there all the time; so in the end, and quite by chance, but for the fact that she was dipping into so many, she took out the right book, and started backward with it in her hand.
The book was The Faerie Queene, and Rachel had extracted it in a Gothic spirit, because she had once heard that very few living persons had read it from end to end ; since she could not become interested in anything, she might as well be thoroughly bored. But she never opened the volume, for in the dark slit which it left something shone like a little new moon. Rachel put in her hand, and felt a small brass handle ; to turn and pull it was the work of her hand without a guiding thought; but when tiers of books swung - towards her with the opening door which they hid, it was not in human nature to shut that door again without so much as peeping in.
Rachel first peeped, then stepped, into a secret
t a i fF
THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM 159
chamber as disappointing at the first glance as such i place could possibly be. It was deep in dust, and filled Ee with packing-cases not half unpacked, a lumber-room , A and nothing more. The door swung to with a click behind her as Rachel stood in the midst of this un- interesting litter, and instinctively she turned round, That instant she stood rooted to the ground, her eyes staring, her chin fallen, a Creadiul fear in every feature of her face,
Tt was not that her see ond hy: band had followed and discovered her; it was the fi
ace of her first husband that looked upon Rachel Steel, his bold eyes staring
into hers, through the brolcen glass of a fly-blivss picture-frame behind the door,
The portrait was not hanging from the wal), ©. resting against it on the floor. It was a photogr), |. enlargement in colours, and the tinted eyes looked .;;; at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remem. bered so keenly in the perished flesh. She had not an eyes ; they spoke in a way ; and yet the Photograph was a that of a much younger man than she had married. = It was Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers, a th, bait parted in the middle, and the kind of pin i a the kind of tie which had been practically obsolete for
; bitably and indisputably

FESR Se ims bats 5
visited in all his travels!
Rachel could have smiled as she drew herself up with this point settled in her mind for ever; why, the room reeked of Australia! ‘These cases which had never been «7~perly unpacked, they were over- flowing with men. als of the life which she herself knew so well. Here a sheaf of boomerangs were peeping out; there was an old grey wideawake, with a blue silk fly-veii coiled above the brim; that was an Australian saddle; and those glass cases contained samples of merino wool. So it was in Australia as a squatter that Steel had made his fortune! But why suppress a fact so free from all discredit ? These were just the relics of a bush life which a departing colonist might care to bring home with him to the old country. Then why cast them into a secret lumber-room whose very existence was unknown to the old Australian's Australian wife ?
Rachel felt her brain reeling; and yet she was
BEITeR PF BRS.
Why had he not told her abo events ?
but a clout of sky trave, It was a
its way the secret chamber, and
162 THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE *
head. ‘Thereafter she escaped incontinently, bet ‘ei cessfully, as she had entered ; closed the hidden door behind her, and restored The Faerie Queene very carefully to its place. Rachel no longer proposed to join the select band of those who have read that epic through.
16s THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
with that slight but unmistakable local accent of which these gentry were themselves all unconscious. Steel had a wicked wit, and Rachel as a rule a sufficiently appreciative smile, but this was to-night either lacking altogether or of an unconvincing character. Rachel could never pretend, and her first spontaneous remark was when her glass filled up with froth.
«“ Champagne !” said she, for they seldom drank it.
“Tt has been such a wretched day,” explained Steel, “that I ordered it medicinally. I am afraid it must have been perishing here, as it was in the town. This is to restore your circulation.”
“ My circulation is all right,” answered Rachel, too honest even to smile upon the man with whom she was going to war. “I felt cold all the morning, but I have been warm enough since the afternoon.”
And that was very true, for excitement had made her blood run hot in every vein; nor had Rachel often bees more handsome, or less lovely, than she was to-night, with her firm lip and her brooding eye.
“There was another reason for the champagne,” resumed her husband, very frankly for him, when at last they hed the drawing-room to themselves. “I ame in disgrace with you, I believe, and I want to hear from you what I have done.”
“It is what you have not done,” returned Rachel, as tee Sood impericaty before the lighted fire; and her bosom rose and Gil, white as the ornate
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BATTLE ROYAL 165 mantelpiece of Carrara marble which gleamed behind her.
“And what, may I ask, is my latest sin of omis- sion?”
Hechel rushed to the point with a passionate direct- ness that did her-no discredit.
“ Why have you pretended all these months that you never were in Australia in your life? Why did you never tell me that | Minchi
“So you have found it out,” said Steel, and his smile only ended as he sipped his coffee; even then there was no end to it in his eyes,
“This afternoon,” said Rachel, disconcerted but not undone,
~ By poking your nose into places which you would not think of approaching in my presence ?”
“By the merest accident in the world”
And Rachel described the accident, truth flashing
te srs ences, Bo \g
166 ‘THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE °
from her eyes; in an instant her husband's face changed, the smile went out, but it was no frown that came in its stead.
“TI beg your pardon, Rachel,” said he, earnestly. “I suppose,” he added, “that a man may call his wife by her Christian name for once in a way? I did so, however, without thinking, and because I really do most humbly beg your pardon for an injustice which I have done you for some hours in my own mind. I came home between three and four, and I heard you were in my study. You were not, but that book was out ; and then, of course, I knew where you were. My hand was on the knob, but I drew it back. I wondered if you would have the pluck to do the tackling! And I apologise again,” Steel con- cluded, “for I knew you quite well enough to have also known that at least there was no question about your courage.”
“Then,” said Rachel, impulsively, after having made up her mind to ignore these compliments, “then I think you might at least be candid with me!”
“ And am I not?” he cried. “Have I denied that the portrait you saw is indeed the portrait of Alexander Minchin? And yet how easy that would have been! It was taken long before you knew him ; he must have altered considerably after that. Or I might have known him under another name. But no; I tell you honestly that your first husband was a very dear friend of mine, more years ago now then I care to
BATTLE ROYAL ‘167
reckon. Did you hear me?” he added, with one of his sudden changes of tone and manner. “A very dear friend, I said, for that he undoubtedly was; but was I going to ask you to marry a very dear friend of the man who deteriorated so terribly, and who treated you so ill?”
Delivered in the most natural manner imaginable, with the quiet confidence of which this man was full, and followed by a smile of conscious yet not unkindly triumph, this argument, like most that fell from his lips upon her ears, was invested with a value out of all proportion to its real worth; and Steel clinched it with one of those homely saws which are not disdained by makers of speeches the wide world over.
“Could you really think,” he added, with one of his rarest and most winning smiles, “that I should be such a fool as to invite you to step out of the frying-pan inte the fire ?”
Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say it was exactly what she had done; but even in that moment she perceived that such a statement would have been very far from the truth. And her nature was large enough to refrain from the momen- tary
he might be; and her only chance was to return to the plain questions with which she had started, de- manding answers as plain. Rachel led up to them, however, with one or two of which she already knew
“ Yet you don’t any longer deny that you have been to Australia ?”
* It is useless, I lived there for years.”
“And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there ?”
“Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to overseer ; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger brother.”
“But no relation, as a matter of fact?”
“None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told you.”
“Then why in the world,” Rachel almost thundered, “could you not tell me so in the beginning ?”
“That is @ question I have already answered,”
“Then I have another. Why so often and s0
i pretend that you mever were in Australia at all?”
“That is a question which I implore you not to press!”
The two answers, so like each other in verbal form, were utterly dissimilar in the manner of their utter- ance. Suddenly, and for the first time in all her knowledge of him, his cynical aplomb had fallen from
at the change in him, «J who am proud of being one myself, What harm could it have done, my knowing that ?”
“You are not the only one from whom I have hidden it,” said Steel, still in a low and altered Voice
Lt YOU brought home all those keepsakes of the bush ?”
“Bat I thought better of them, and have never ‘vem unpacked them all, as you must have seen for yourself.”
eg Lom mysterious visitor of the other day-——»
“Another Australian, of couric
“ And he knows why you don’t want it known over here ?” “ He does,” said Steel, with grim brevity, moved forward and pressed his hand impulsively, To hor surprise the pressure was returned, That instant their hands fell apart.
again re-open I won't even
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‘ — a 170 THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
try to guess. I undertook not to try to probe your past, and I will keep my undertaking in the main; but where it impinges upon my own past I ‘simply cannot! You say you were my first husband's close friend,” added Rachel, looking her second husband more squarely than ever in the eyes, “Was that what brought you to my trial for his murder ?”
He returned her look.
Tb was.”
“Was that what made you wish to marry me yourself ?”
No answer, but his assurance coming back, as he stood looking at her under beetling eyebrows, over black arms folded across a snowy shirt. It was the wrong moment for the old Adam’s return, for Rachel had reached the point upon which she most passionately desired enlightenment.
“I want’to know,” she cried, “and I insist on knowing, what first put it into your head or your heart to marry me—all but convicted —— ”
Steel held up his hand, glancing in apprehension towards the door.
“I have told you so often,” he said, “and your glass tells you whenever you look into it. I sat within a few feet of you for the inside of a week!”
“But that is not true,” she told him quietly; “trust a woman to know, if it were.”
In the white glare of the electric light he seemed for once to change colour slightly.
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BATTLE ROYAL 171
“If you will not accept my word,” he answered, “there is no more to be said.”
And he switched off a bunch of the lights that had beaten too fiercely upon him; but it only looked as if he was about to end the interview.
“You have admitted so many untruths in the last half-hour,” pursued Rachel, in a thrilling voice, “that you ought not to be hurt if I suspect you of another. Come! Can you look me in the face and tell me that you married me for love? No, you turn away— because you cannot ! Then will you, in God’s name, tell me why you did marry me?”
And she followed him with clasped hands, her beautiful eyes filled with tears, her white throat quivering with sobs, until suddenly he turned upon her as though in self-defence.
“No, I will not!” he cried. “ Since the answer I have given you, and the obvious answer, is not good enough for you, the best thing you can do is to find out for yourself.”
A truculent look came into Rachel’s eyes, as they rested upon the smooth face so unusually agitated beneath the smooth silvery hair.
“I will!” she answered through her teeth, «| take you at your word, and find out for myself I will!”
And she swept past him out of the room.
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