THE

CHAPTER XXXI

HE rumour which was going the round of the clubs in due time reached Lady Cayley through the Ransomes. It roused in her many violent and conflicting emotions.

She sat trembling in the Ransomes' drawing-room. Mrs. Ransome had just asked whether there was anything in it; because if there was, she, Mrs. Ransome, washed her hands of her. She intimated that it would take a good deal of washing to get Sarah off her hands.

Sarah had unveiled the face of horror, the face of outraged virtue, and the wrath and writhing of propriety wounded in the uncertain, quivering, vital spot. During the unveiling Dick Ransome had come in. He wanted to know if Topsy had been bullying poor Toodles. Whereupon Topsy wept feebly, and poor Toodles had a moment of monstrous calm.

She wanted to get it quite clear, to make no mistake. They might as well give her the details. Majendie had left his wife, had he? Well, she wasn't surprised at that. The wonder was that, having married her, he had stuck to her so long. He had left his wife, and was living at Scarby, was he, with her? Well, she only wanted to get all the details clear.

At this Sarah fell into a fit of laughter very terrifying to see. Since her own sister wouldn't take her word for it, she supposed she'd have to prove that it was not so. And, under the horror of her virtue and respectability,

there heaved a dull, dumb fury, born of her memory that it once was, her belief that it might have been again, and her knowledge that it was not so. She trembled, shaken by the troubling of the fire that ran underground, the immense, unseen, unliberated, primeval fire. She was no longer a creature of sophistries, hypocrisies, and wiles. She was the large woman of the simple earth, welded by the dark, unspiritual flame.

Dick Ransome turned on his sister-in-law a pale, puffy face in which two little dark eyes twinkled with a shrewd, gross humour. Nothing could possibly have pleased Dick Ransome more than an exhibition of indignant virtue, as achieved by Sarah. He knew a great deal more about Sarah than Mrs. Ransome knew, or than Sarah knew herself. To Dick Ransome's mind, thus illumined by knowledge, that spectacle swept the whole range of human comedy. He sat taking in all the entertainment it presented; and, when it was all over, he remarked quietly that Toodles needn't bother about her proofs. He had got them too. He knew that it was not so. He could tell her that much, but he wasn't going to give Majendie away. No, she couldn't get any more out of him than that.

Sarah smiled. She did not need to get anything more out of him. She had her proof; or, if it didn't exactly amount to proof, she had her clue. She had found it long ago; and she had followed it up, if not to the end, at any rate, quite far enough. She reflected that Majendie, like the dear fool he always was, had given it to her himself, five years ago.

Men's sins take care of themselves. It is their innocent good deeds that start the hounds of destiny. When Majendie sent Maggie Forrest's handiwork to Mrs. Ran

some, with a kind note recommending the little embroideress, by that innocent good deed he woke the sleeping dogs of destiny. Mrs. Ransome's sister had tracked poor Maggie down by the long trail of her beautiful embroidery. She had been baffled when the embroidered clue broke off. Now, after three years, she leaped (and it was not a very difficult leap for Lady Cayley) to the firm conclusion. Maggie Forrest and her art had disappeared for three years; so, at perilous intervals, had Majendie; therefore they had disappeared together.

Sarah did not like the look in Dick Ransome's eye. She removed herself from it to the seclusion of her bedroom. There she bathed her heated face with toilette vinegar, steadied her nerves with a cigarette, lay down on a couch and rested, and, pure from passion, revised the situation calmly. She was an eminently practical, sensible woman, who knew the facts of life, and knew, also, how to turn them to her own advantage.

Seen by the larger, calmer spirit that was Sarah now, the situation was not as unpleasant as it had at first appeared. To be sure, the rumour in which she had figured was fatal to the matrimonial vision, and to the beautiful illusion of propriety in which she had once lived. But Sarah had renounced the vision; she had abandoned the pursuit of the fugitive propriety. She had long ago seen through the illusion. She might be a deceiver, but she had no power to hoodwink her own indestructible lucidity. Looking back on her life, after the joyous romances of her youth, the years had passed like so many funeral processions, each bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial. Then there had come the dreary funeralfeast, and then the days of mournful rehabilitation. Oh, that rehabilitation! There had been three years of it.

Three years of exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling, and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing. There had been a dubious triumph. Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship, and palpable frustration. After all that, there was something flattering in the thought that, at fortyfive, she should yet find her name still coupled with Walter Majendie's in a passionate adventure.

It might easily have been, but for Walter's imbecile, suicidal devotion to his wife. He had got nothing out of his marriage. Worse than nothing. He was the laughing-stock of all his friends who were in the secret; who saw him grovelling at the heels of a disagreeable woman who had made him conspicuous by her aversion. Of course, it might easily have been.

Sarah's imagination (for she had an imagination) drew out all the sweetness that there was for it in that idea. Then it occurred to her sound, prosaic commonsense, that a reputation is still a reputation, all the more precious if somewhat precariously acquired; that, though you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, hanging is very poor fun when for years you have seen nothing of sheep or lamb either; that, in short, she must take steps to save her reputation.

The shortest way to save it was the straight way. She would go straight to Mrs. Majendie with her proofs. Her duty to herself justified the somewhat unusual step. And, more than her duty, Sarah loved a scene. She loved to play with other people's emotions and to exhibit her own. She wanted to see how Mrs. Majendie would take it; how the white-faced, high-handed lady would look when she was told that her husband had consoled himself for her high-handedness. She had always been pos

1

sessed by an ungovernable curiosity with regard to Majendie's wife.

She did not know Majendie's wife, but she knew Majendie. She knew all about the separation and its cause. That was where she had come in. She divined that Mrs. Majendie had never forgiven her husband for his old intimacy with her. It was Mrs. Majendie's jealousy that had driven him out of the house, into the arms of pretty Maggie. Where, she wondered, would Mrs. Majendie's jealousy of pretty Maggie drive him?

Though Sarah knew Majendie, that was more than she would undertake to say. But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered; and the more she wondered, the more she desired to know.

She wondered whether Mrs. Majendie had heard the report. From all she could gather, it was hardly likely. Neither Mrs. Majendie nor her friends mixed in those circles where it went the round. The scandal of the clubs and of the Park would never reach her in the high seclusion of the house in Prior Street.

Into that house Lady Cayley could not hope to penetrate except by guile. Once admitted, straightforwardness would be her method. She must not attempt to give the faintest social colour to her visit. She must take for granted Mrs. Majendie's view of her impossibility. To be sure Mrs. Majendie's prejudices were moral even more than social. But moral prejudice could be overcome by cleverness working towards a formidable moral effect.

She would call after six o'clock, an hour incompatible with any social intention. An hour when she would probably find Mrs. Majendie alone.

She rested all afternoon. At five o'clock she fortified