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Page 16
"Take it back, then."
But Henry did not answer, and they parted. Each sought his own
bedroom, and while Lennox retired at once and might have been
expected to pass a night more mentally peaceful than the other,
in reality it was not so.
The younger slept ill, while May suffered no emotion but annoyance.
He was contemptuous of Henry. It seemed to him that he had taken
a rather mean and unsporting line, nor did he believe for a moment
that he was honest. Lennox had a modern mind; he had been through
the furnace of war; he had received a first-class education. It
seemed impossible to imagine that he spoke the truth, or that his
sudden suspicion of real perils, beyond human power to combat,
could be anything but a spiteful attempt to put May off, after he
himself had lost the toss. Yet that seemed unlike a gentleman.
Then the allusion to Mary perturbed the sailor. He could not
quarrel with the words, but he resented the advice, seeing what it
was based upon.
His anger lessened swiftly, however, and before he started his
adventure he had dismissed Henry from his mind. He put on pyjamas
and a dressing-gown, took a candle, a railway-rug, his watch, and
the loaded revolver.
Then he walked quietly down the corridor to the Grey Room. On
reaching it his usual good temper returned, and he found himself
entirely happy and contented. He unlocked the forbidden entrance,
set his candle by the bed, and locked the door again from inside.
He rolled up his dressing-gown for a pillow, and placed his watch
and revolver and candle at his hand on a chair. A few broken
reflections drifted through his mind, as he yawned and prepared
to sleep. His brain brought up events of the day--a missed shot,
a good shot, lunch under a haystack with Mary and Fayre-Michell's
niece. She was smart and showy and slangy--cheap every way
compared with Mary. What would his wife think if she knew he was
so near? Come to him for certain. He cordially hoped that he
might not be recalled to his ship; but there was a possibility of
it. It would be rather a lark to show the governor over the
Indomitable. She was a "hush-hush" ship--one of the wonders of
the Navy still. Funny that the Italian roof of the Grey Room
looked like a dome, though it was really flat. A cunning trick
of perspective.
It was a still and silent night, moonless, very dark, and very
tranquil. He went to the window to throw it open.
Only a solitary being waked long that night at Chadlands, and only
a solitary mind suffered tribulation. But into the small hours
Henry Lennox endured the companionship of disquiet thoughts. He
could not sleep, and his brain, clear enough, retraced no passage
from the past day. Indeed the events of the day had sunk into
remote time. He was only concerned with the present, and he
wondered while he worried that he should be worrying. Yet a
proleptic instinct made him look forward. He had neither lied nor
exaggerated to May. From the moment of losing the toss, he honestly
experienced a strong, subjective impression of danger arising out
of the proposed attack on the mysteries of the Grey Room. It was,
indeed, that consciousness of greater possibilities in the adventure
than May admitted or imagined which made Lennox so insistent.
Looking back, he perceived many things, and chiefly that he had
taken a wrong line, and approached Mary's husband from a fatal
angle. Too late he recognized his error. It was inevitable that
a hint of suspected danger would confirm the sailor in his
resolution; and that such a hint should follow the spin of the
coin against Lennox, and be accompanied by the assurance that, had
he won, Henry would have proceeded, despite his intuitions, to do
what he now begged Tom not to do--that was a piece of clumsy work
which he deeply regretted.
At the hour when his own physical forces were lowest, his errors
of diplomacy forced themselves upon his mind. He wasted much time,
as all men do upon their beds, in anticipating to-morrow; in
considering what is going to happen, or what is not; in weighing
their own future words and deeds given a variety of contingencies.
For reason, which at first kept him, despite his disquiet, in the
region of the rational, grew weaker with Henry as the night
advanced; the shadow of trouble deepened as his weary wits lost
their balance to combat it. The premonition was as formless and
amorphous as a cloud, and, though he could not see any shape to
his fear, or define its limitations, it grew darker ere he slept.
He considered what might happen and, putting aside any lesser
disaster, tried to imagine what the morning would bring if May
actually succumbed.
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