Read Ebook: Tetherstones by Dell Ethel M Ethel May

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Ebook has 2943 lines and 106713 words, and 59 pages

"Why do you rise, Miss Thorold? Pray continue your task. You waste time by these observances."

She straightened the last page and made quiet reply. "I think I have finished my task for this morning, my lord. In any case it is luncheon-time."

"You have finished?" He took up the pile of typescript with eagerness, but in a moment tossed it down again with exasperation. "You call that finished!"

"For this morning," repeated Frances Thorold, in her quiet, unmoved voice. "It is a lengthy, and a difficult, piece of work. But I hope to finish it to-night."

"It must be finished to-night," said the Bishop with decision. "It is essential that it should be handed to me for revision by nine o'clock. Kindly make a note of this, Miss Thorold! I must say I am disappointed by your rate of progress. I had hoped that work so purely mechanical would have taken far less time."

He spoke with curt impatience, but no shade of feeling showed upon his secretary's face. She said nothing whatever in reply.

The Bishop, lean, ascetic, forbidding of aspect, pulled at his clean-shaven chin with an irritable gesture. He had a bundle of letters in his hand which he flapped down upon the table before her.

"I had hoped for better things," he said. "There are these to be answered, and when is time to be found for them if your whole day is to be occupied in the typing of my treatise--a very simple piece of work, mere, rough copy, after all, which will have to be done again from beginning to end after my revision?"

"I will take your notes upon those this afternoon," said Frances. "I will have them ready for your signature in time to catch the midnight post."

"Absurd!" said the Bishop. "They must go before then."

She heard him without dismay. "Then I will do them first, and type the rest of the treatise afterwards," she said.

He made a sound of impatience. "A highly unsatisfactory method of procedure! I am afraid I cannot compliment you upon the business-like way in which you execute your duties."

He did not expect a reply to this, but as if out of space it came.

"Yet I execute them," said Frances Thorold steadily and respectfully.

He looked at her sharply, his cold grey eyes drawn to keen attention. "With very indifferent success," he commented. "Pray remember that, Miss Thorold, should the position you occupy ever tempt you to feel uplifted!"

She made no answer, and her face of utter passivity revealed nothing to his unsparing scrutiny. He passed the matter by as unworthy of further consideration. If any impertinence had been intended, he had quelled it at the outset. He did not ask for deference from his subordinates, but he demanded--and he obtained--implicit submission. He had a gift for exacting this, regarding everyone whom he employed as a mere puppet made to respond to the pulling of a string. If at any time the puppet failed to respond, it was thrown aside immediately as worthless. He was a man who had but one aim and object in life, and this he followed with untiring and wholly ruthless persistence. Before all things he desired and so far as his powers permitted he meant to achieve, the establishment of the Church as a paramount and enduring force above all other forces. With the fervour and the self-abnegation of a Jesuit, he followed unswervingly this one great idea, trampling down all lesser things, serving only the one imperative need. It was his idol, his fetish--this dream of power, and he worshipped it blindly, not realising that the temple he sought to erect was already dedicated to personal ambition rather than to the glory of God.

He worked unceasingly, with crude, fanatical endeavour--a man born out of his generation, belonging to a sterner age, and curiously at variance with the world in which he lived.

To him Frances Thorold was only a small cog-wheel of that machine which he was striving to drive for the accomplishment of his ends. The failure of such a minute portion of mechanism was of small importance to him. She had her uses, undoubtedly, but she could be replaced at almost any moment. She suited his purpose perhaps a shade better than most, but another could be very quickly fitted to the same end. He was an adept at moulding and bending the various portions of his machine to his will. Not one of them ever withstood him for long.

The rosy-faced Dean, with his funny Shakespearean hobby-horse, was as putty in his hands, and it never struck him that that same pink-cheeked curiosity was a tool infinitely more fit for the Master's use than he himself could ever be. Neither did he ever dream of the fiery scorn that burned so deeply in his secretary's silent soul as she bent herself to the burden he daily laid upon her. It would not have interested him had he known. The welfare of the dogs under the table had never been any concern of the Bishop of Burminster. They were lucky to eat of the crumbs.

And so he passed her by as unworthy of notice, merely glancing through her script and curtly noting a fault here and there, finally tossing the pages down and turning from her with a brief, "You will lunch with me, but pray be as speedy as possible and return to your work as soon as you have finished!"

That was his method of exacting the utmost from her. Under those hard grey eyes she would spend no more than the allotted half-hour out of the office-chair.

And the sun still shone upon that garden of dreams, while the bees hummed lazily among the blue and purple flowers. And all was peace and beauty--save for the fierce fanaticism in the man's heart, and the bitter, smouldering resentment in the woman's.

Four people sat at the old oak table in the oak-raftered dining-room of the Bishop's palace that day, and no greater contrast than they presented could well have existed among beings of the same race.

Dr. Rotherby--the Bishop--sat in pre-occupied silence scanning an ecclesiastical paper while he ate. He never encouraged conversation at any meal save dinner, and his sister, Miss Rotherby, nervous, pinched, and dyspeptic, supported him dutifully in this as in every other whim. She sat with her knitting on the table beside her ready to be picked up at every spare moment, on the principle that every second was of value--a short-sighted, unimaginative woman whose whole attention was concentrated upon the accomplishment of her own salvation.

Montague Rotherby, the sunburnt man of travel, sat between the two, and wondered what he was doing there. He had just wandered home from an expedition in Central Africa, and he had come hither with the half-formed intention of writing a book on his experiences. He wanted peace and quiet for the purpose, and these surroundings had seemed ideal. The Bishop and his sister had given him welcome, and he had believed himself to be fulfilling a family duty by visiting them. But he had begun already to realize that there was something very vital lacking in the atmosphere of the Palace. The place was stiff with orthodoxy, and he himself as much a stranger as he had ever been in the most desert corner of his travels.

"Can't stand this much longer," was his thought, as he sat before the polished board on this the fourth day of his sojourn.

And then his look fell upon the secretary seated opposite to him, and his interest stirred again.

She sat, remote and silent, in the shadow of a heavy green curtain against which the pallor of her face took a ghastly hue. Her eyes were downcast, the brows above them slightly drawn, conveying somehow an impression of mute endurance to the observant onlooker. He watched her narrowly, having nothing else to occupy him, and the impression steadily grew as the meal proceeded. She scarcely touched the food before her, remaining almost statuesque in her immobility, had her obvious insignificance not precluded so stately a term. To the man who watched her, her attitude expressed more than mere passivity. She was a figure of tragedy, and as it were in spite of itself his careless soul was moved to an unwonted compassion. In silence he awaited developments.

They came, more swiftly than even he anticipated. Very suddenly the Bishop looked up from his paper.

"Miss Thorold, you have work to do. I beg you will not linger here if you have finished."

His voice came with the rasp of authority through the sultry summer quiet. The secretary started as if at the piercing of a nerve and instantly rose to leave the table. She pushed in her chair methodically, but oddly at that point her intention seemed to fail her. She stood swaying as one stricken with a curious uncertainty, gazing straight upwards with dazed eyes that ever travelled farther and farther back as if they marked the flight of an invisible bird.

Rotherby sprang to his feet, but he was too late. Even as he did so, she threw up her hands like a baffled swimmer and fell straight backwards on the polished floor. The sound of her fall mingled with the furious exclamation that leapt to Rotherby's lips--an exclamation which he certainly would not have uttered in a more reasoned moment--and he was round the table and by her side almost before the two other spectators had realized what was taking place.

"Oh, good gracious!" gasped the Bishop's sister, pushing back her chair with the gesture of one seeking to avoid contact with something obnoxious. "What is it? What is the matter?"

"It is only a faint." Curt and contemptuous came the Bishop's reply. He also pushed back his chair and rose, but with considerably more of annoyance than agitation. "Lay her in that chair, Montague! She will soon recover. She is only overcome by the heat."

"Overcome!" growled Montague, and he said it between his teeth. In that moment, cool man of the world though he was, he was angry, even furious, for the white face with its parted, colourless lips somehow excited more than pity. "She's worn out--driven to death by that accursed typewriting. Why, she's nothing but skin and bone!"

He raised the slight, inert figure with the words, holding it propped against his knee while with one hand on the dark head he pressed it forward. It was a device which he had not thought would fail, but it had no effect upon the unconscious secretary, and a sharp misgiving went through him as he realized the futility of his efforts.

He flung a brief command upwards, instinctively assuming the responsibility. "Get some brandy--quick!"

"There is no brandy in the house," said the Bishop. "But this is nothing. It will pass. Have you never seen a woman faint before?"

"Damnation!" flared forth Montague. "Do you want her to die on your hands? There is brandy in a flask in my room. Send one of the servants for it!"

"This is dreadful!" wailed Miss Rotherby hysterically. "I haven't so much as a bottle of smelling-salts in the place! She has never behaved in this extraordinary way before! What can be the matter?"

"Don't be foolish!" said the Bishop, and firmly rang the bell. "She will be herself again in five minutes. If not, we will have a doctor."

"Better send for one at once," said Montague with his fingers seeking a pulse that was almost imperceptible.

"Very well," said the Bishop stiffly. "Perhaps it would be the wisest course. Why do you kneel there? She would be far better in a chair."

"Because I won't take the responsibility of moving her," said Montague.

"This is very painful," said Miss Rotherby tremulously, gathering up her knitting. "Is there nothing to be done? You are sure she isn't dead?"

"I am not at all sure," said Montague. "I shouldn't stay if I were you. But get someone to bring me that brandy at once!"

He had his way, for there was about him a force that would not be denied. In moments of emergency he was accustomed to assert himself, but how it came about that when the brandy arrived, the Bishop himself had gone to telephone for a doctor and the Bishop's sister had faded away altogether, lamenting her inability to be of use in so serious a crisis, even Montague could not very easily have said. He was still too angry and too anxious to take much note of anything beyond the ghastly face that rested against his arm.

Impatiently he dismissed the servant who was inclined to hang over him with futile suggestions, and then realized with a grimace that he was left in sole charge of a woman whom he scarcely knew, who might die at any moment, if indeed she were not already dead.

"Damn it, she shan't!" he said to himself with grim resolution as this thought forced itself upon him. "If these miserable worms can't do anything to save her, I will."

And he applied himself with the dexterity of a steady nerve to the task of coaxing a spoonful of brandy between the livid lips.

He expected failure, but a slight tremor at the throat and then a convulsive attempt to swallow rewarded him. He lifted her higher, muttering words of encouragement of which he was hardly aware.

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