Suspense

HISTORY repeats itself!

It was dreadful how the phrase recurred in her mind, as though in it there dwelt an imp determined to torture her with its incessant repetition, as though the imp knew that this night would be one of tragedy as that other night had been twelve years ago.

Twelve years ago, almost on the same date of the year, Mary Gordon had walked about this pleasant room in the rambling homestead of Meena Station waiting for her husband to come home. The same clock on the mantelshelf was chiming out the quarter-hours as it had done that night twelve years before. The same calendar had then announced the date, the nineteenth of April, as to-night it announced the date, the eighteenth of April. It was raining this night as it had rained that other terrible night of suspense, and the sound of it on the iron roof annoyed her because it interfered with the sound she longed to hear-hoof beats on the sodden ground.

Eight times the hammer struck the gong within the clock.

The dinner table was set out for three persons. The spoiling dinner was being kept warm on the oven shelves and on either side of the stove. Eight o’clock, and the dinner had been waiting two hours!

Twelve years before, Mary’s husband had not come home. Was her son, John, not to come home this night?

Mary found it impossible to sit down, to read or sew. The rain maintained a steady thrumming on the roof, and within this major sound were others, the hiss of falling rain on the leaves of the two orange-trees, just beyond the veranda, on the roofs of more distant outhouses. The early darkness was accounted for by the low rain clouds that had begun their endless march from the north-west shortly after noon.

“What on earth’s keeping them?”

Standing at the open door of this large kitchen-living-room, Mary strained her hearing to catch the sound of hoof beats beyond the sound of the rain, but beyond the rain she could hear nothing.