Amber felt that she would burst with rage and raised her clenched fist to strike him. But he stood so imperturbably, looked at her so coldly, that though she hesitated for several seconds she at last muttered a curse, turned, and ran out of the library.
Her hatred of Radclyffe was so intense that it ate into her brain. He obsessed her day and night until it became a torment which seemed unendurable—and she began to scheme how she might be rid of him. She wanted him dead.
On just one occasion, and that by accident, did Amber come close to making an important discovery about the man she had married. She had never tried to understand him or to learn what had made him the kind of person he was, for they not only disliked each other but found each other mutually uninteresting.
One night in August she was considering which gown she would wear the following day—for they were expecting a number of guests, most of them Jenny’s relatives, who were coming to be presented to the new Countess and to spend a few days. Amber was delighted at the opportunity it would give her to show off, and did not doubt that they would be vastly impressed, for they were all people who lived in the country and most of the women had not even been to London since the Restoration. The strict respectable old families would have nothing at all to do with the new Court.
She and Nan were going through the tall standing cabinets in which her clothes were kept, amusing themselves by recalling what had happened the night she had worn a certain gown.
“Oh! That’s what I had on the first night Lord Carlton came Dangerfield House!” She snatched the champagne-lace and gold-spangled gown out of the huge wardrobe and held it against herself, smoothing out the folds, wistfully dreaming. But she put it back again with sudden resolution. “And look, Nan! This is what I was presented at. Court in!”
At last they took down the white-satin pearl-embroidered gown she had worn the night of her wedding to Radclyffe. Both of them looked it over critically, feeling the material, seeing how it was made, and commenting on how strangely well it had fitted her—just a bit too large in the waist, perhaps, and ever so slightly too small across the bosom.
“I wonder who it belonged to,” mused Amber, though she had completely forgotten it in the eight months that had passed since the marriage.
“Maybe his Lordship’s first Countess. Why don’t you ask ’im sometime? It’s got me curious.”
“I think I will.”
At ten o’clock Radclyffe came upstairs from the library. That was the hour at which they usually went to bed and he was prompt in his habits, faithful to each smallest one—a characteristic of which she and Philip had taken due advantage. Amber was sitting in a chair reading Dryden’s new play, “Secret Love,” and as he went through the bedroom into his own closet neither of them spoke or seemed aware of the other. He had never once allowed her to see him naked—nor did she wish to—and when he returned he was wearing a handsome dressing-gown made of a fine East Indian silk patterned in many soft subdued colours. As he took a snuffer and started around the room to put the candles out Amber got up and tossed away her book, stretching her arms over her head and yawning.
“That old white-satin gown,” she said idly. “The one you wanted me to wear when we were married—where did you get it? Who wore it before I did?”
He paused and looked at her, smiling reflectively. “It’s strange you haven’t asked me that before. However, there seem to be few enough decencies between us—I may as well tell you. It was intended to be the wedding-gown of a young woman I once expected to marry—but did not.”
Amber raised her eyebrows, unmistakably pleased. “Oh? So you were jilted.”
“No, I was not jilted. She disappeared one night during the siege of her family’s castle in 1643. Her parents never heard from her again, and we were forced to conclude that she had been captured and killed by the Parliamentarians—” Amber saw in his eyes an expression which was new to her. It was profoundly sad and yet he was obviously deriving some measure of gratification, almost of happiness, from this recalling of the past. There was about him now a strange new quality of gentleness which she had never suspected he might possess. “She was a very beautiful and kind and generous woman—a lady. It seems incredible now—and yet the first time I saw you I was strongly reminded of her. Why, I can’t imagine. You don’t look like her—or only a very little—and certainly you have none of the qualities which I admired in her.” He gave a faint shrug, looking not at Amber but somewhere back into the past, a past where he had left his heart. And then his eyes turned to her again, the mask sliding over his face, the past resolving into the present. He went on snuffing the candles; the last one went out and the room was suddenly dark.
