The letters were in her jewel-case. She lifted the lid. Francis had given her his mother’s diamonds, but she didn’t care for them very much. They really wanted setting again. He was obstinate about things like that. This room was frightful-all heavy Victorian mahogany, but she hadn’t managed to move him the least little bit about it. She could get new chintzes if she liked. He wasn’t going to have good old furniture turned out to make room for rubbish.
Under Lady Colesborough’s diamonds in the bottom compartment of the massive old-fashioned case which had been Lady Colesborough’s too the letters lay in a flat bundle. Sylvia had wrapped them in a silk handkerchief, an odd one of Marcia’s, dark brown and green. She thought it very ugly and would be quite pleased to be rid of it. She put the packet in the pocket of her cloak, opened her bedroom door, and stood there listening. The servants were all in bed long ago, and Francis was in his study. He would be there for more than an hour yet, so that there was nothing to be afraid of. She had only to walk along the corridor and down the big staircase into the hall. She wouldn’t even have to pass the study. It was quite easy. Yet she stood there for a long time hearing the faint, measured tick of the old clock. There was no other sound.
When she came to the stair head she listened again, but now she could not even hear the clock ticking. As she went downstairs, she thought of what she would say if Francis met her. He wouldn’t of course, but if he did, what should she say? Biscuits-yes, that would do-she was hungry and thought she would like a biscuit. She wondered if anyone ever really ate biscuits in the middle of the night-so dry and crumby. Perhaps it had better be orange juice, or a book-but she hardly ever did read anything, and if Francis didn’t believe her, it might be very frightening indeed. No, it had better be orange juice. Orange juice would be safe.
The hall was very large. The drawing-room lay on one side of it and the dining-room on the other, with the study behind the dining-room. There was no corresponding room on the other side, because the drawing-room took up the extra space, but there was a passage which ran past the drawing-room to a room that was called the Parlour. It was supposed to be Sylvia’s own sitting-room, but she did not care for it very much. She would have liked to have the old dark panelling painted white and throw away the faded Persian rugs, but Francis would not hear of it. He said his mother had done her best to spoil the room by having a French window put in, and he wasn’t going to let it go any farther.
It was the French window which was taking Sylvia to the Parlour. It opened so easily, and when it was open she would only have to cross the terrace and run down the steps to be straight in line for the yew walk. It was easy as easy, and if only Mr. Zero was punctual, she would be back in her room in less than ten minutes. And what a relief that would be.
Francis Colesborough pushed his chair a little farther back from the desk at which he had been writing. He had a letter in his hand, a letter which he had no more than begun to write. The last line was incomplete. He had the air of a man who has been disturbed, yet he himself could not have said what it was that had disturbed him. He stayed like that, listening, and heard a sound so faint that only a sense keyed to an unnatural tension would have caught it. It came to him as the sound of metal against metal, and immediately he remembered the window which had been unlatched two nights ago. He thought that someone had unlatched a window now. He threw the letter down upon the blotting-pad and went to the nearest window. With the curtains dropped behind him he looked out along the terrace and saw a bright rectangle aslant upon the flags. There was a light in the Parlour, and the curtains had been drawn back. The bright rectangle moved, the glass door swung. He had looked a half second too late to see who had opened it and come down the steps, but there was a shadow that slipped along the dark terrace and was gone. An open window two nights ago in town, and tonight an open door-and Sylvia slipping out-Sylvia-
He turned back into the room, pulled open a drawer, took out a small Browning pistol, and was back at the window, opening it before a tenth of a minute had gone by. He ran down the terrace steps and out on to the lawn. He was quicker than Sylvia and as silent. She did not know that he was no more than a dozen yards behind her as she groped her way into the black mouth of the yew alley. He halted there, and heard her going away from him between the over-arching yews. A twig broke now and then. He heard her catch her breath. The sounds receded.
He swung about and ran along the path which lay between the rose garden and the lawn. The path went straight to the end of the lawn, turned, and went straight again to skirt the yew hedge on the farther side and come out upon a stretch of level sward. Francis Colesborough came running by this way. He had no light, and needed none. These were paths he had trodden for nearly forty years. He had played at hide-and-seek about the old yew walk when he was a child of five. His foot knew every step and had no need for the guiding eye. He checked at the edge of the sward and moved out upon its soft-foot and intent.
XVIII
Gay came suddenly to the bushes’ end and felt her feet on grass. The path had brought her out upon the wide lawn at the back of the house. She remembered it quite well. Francis had taken them out through a glass door, and first there had been a wide terrace, and then steps which led down to the lawn, and at the far end of the lawn a rose garden with the yew walk cutting it in two and spreading out like the top of the letter T to shut the roses in. So she had only to find the middle of the lawn and then keep straight on with her back to the house until she came to the open end of the yew walk.
She moved clear of the bushes and looked towards the house. She could see it very big, and blurred, and black, with the gloom of trees on either side of it melting away into the outer darkness. A little to one side a bright rectangle broke the shadowy mass. There was a door there, a door with glass in it right down to the ground, and there was a light in the room behind it. She thought that the door was open, and thought how exactly like Sylvia to come out at night on a quite dreadfully secret errand and leave an open door and a lighted room behind her.
She found her way across the lawn and came to the end of the grass. There was a path-she remembered that there was a path which bordered the rose garden, and Francis had told them how his father had made it when he cut down that part of the old yew hedge. “He had it cut because he wanted to see the roses from the house. Rather an old vandal.” That was what Francis had said. And the cutting down had left the yew walk exactly like the letter T, with its long stem facing her now and the cross-piece running away to right and left on the far side of the rose garden.
Three steps took her over the path and into the black mouth of the walk. It was really a tunnel, for the yews met overhead, and had met and grown together and made an arching roof for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was quite pitch dark in the walk, quite, quite pitch dark, and dry under foot, with little brittle twigs and a queer cold smell. The walk was fifty yards long-Francis had told them so. She had to grope for fifty yards in the black tunnel where she couldn’t see anything at all. But she ought to be able to make out the window at the far end. Because there was a window there, a wide rectangle cut in the hedge, and a seat where you could rest on a hot sunny day and look down a winding glade to the river and its meadowland.