CHAPTER XXIIHUSBAND AND WIFE
Morricestayed in the next day waiting for the return of his wife from her country visit. She was to arrive home in time for lunch. About twelve o’clock Rosabelle came into his room; she had just returned from her visit to Lane.
“Oh, uncle, there is a strange young man in the hall with a letter for auntie. He says his instructions are to give it into her own hands. He was told that she would be back before lunch-time, and he said he would wait. He seems rather mysterious. Would you like to see him?”
Morrice nodded his head and strode into the hall, where he found standing a sallow-faced young fellow, quite a youth, with a tall footman mounting guard over him, as it were, on the look-out for felonious attempts.
“What is it you’re wanting, my man?” he asked roughly. He did not, any more than his servant, like the appearance of the fellow, who seemed a furtive kind of creature with a shifty expression.
The furtive one explained hesitatingly in a strong cockney accent: “A letter for Mrs. Morrice, sir. I was to be sure and give it into no hands but her own.”
Something very suspicious about this, certainly. Morrice thought a moment, pondering as to the best way to proceed with this rather unprepossessing specimen of humanity. He had a common and unintelligent kind of face, but he looked as if he possessed a fair share of low cunning.
A week ago Morrice would have thought nothing of such an incident; he would have told the man to come later when his wife would have returned. But recent events had developed certain faculties and made him anxious to probe everything to the bottom, to scent mystery in every trifling act.
“Who sent you with the letter, and gave you such precise instructions, my man?”
The answer came back: “Mrs. Macdonald, sir.”
Morrice’s brows contracted. He was as sure as he could be of anything that the man was telling a lie.
“Mrs. Macdonald, eh? Where does she live?” was the next question.
This time the answer did not come as readily; there was a perceptible hesitation. Morrice guessed the reason as rapidly as Lane himself would have done. The sender of the letter had primed the messenger with a false address. Out of loyalty to his employer, he had been cudgelling his rather slow brains to invent one.
“Number 16 Belle-Vue Mansions, Hogarth Road, Putney,” he said, speaking after that slight hesitation with a certain glibness that was likely to carry conviction.
Morrice did not know of any woman of the name of Macdonald amongst his wife’s acquaintances. Still, that might mean nothing; it might be a beggingletter which the writer had taken these unusual means of getting to her.
“Let me have a look at the envelope,” demanded Morrice.
The shabby, furtive-looking young fellow began to appear a bit uneasy, with the dictatorial master of the house regarding him with anything but a favourable eye, the young girl standing in the background who seemed no more friendly, and the tall footman standing before the door, barring a sudden exit.
“Beg pardon, sir, but my orders was most precise to only give it into the hands of the lady herself.”
Morrice saw that he must change his tactics. He took from his pocket a couple of treasury-notes which made a pleasant crackle as he flourished them before the youth’s face.
“You see these, don’t you? I take it you haven’t got too much money. They are yours if you let me see the envelope, only the envelope. I don’t want to take your letter,” he added with a cunning that was quite a recent development of his character. “As soon as I’ve seen that you can go out and come back in an hour when Mrs. Morrice will have returned home.”
The youth fell into the trap. Slowly he produced from his pocket the letter which he held gingerly between his finger and thumb for the inspection of the superscription on the envelope. Quick as lightning, Morrice snatched at it and put his hand behind his back, throwing at him with his disengaged hand the treasury-notes he had promised.
“Now get out of this, my fine fellow, and never dare to come to this house again with such an impudent message. Tell Mrs. Macdonald of Putney, or whoever it may be that sent you, that Mr. Morrice insisted on having that letter, and that it will be given to Mrs. Morrice on her return.”
The furtive creature slunk away; after that drasticaction he had no more fight in him. Morrice remembered the waiting footman whose impassive countenance did not betray any surprise at this rather extraordinary scene over what seemed a trifle, and turned to his niece with a smile that was decidedly forced.
“Never heard of such cheek in my life. Some impudent mendicant, I expect. By gad, they are up to all sorts of dodges nowadays.”
He marched back into his own room, and Rosabelle went to hers to think over what this action of her uncle’s meant. It was evident he attached considerable significance to that letter which was only to be delivered into Mrs. Morrice’s hands. What was he going to do with it? Well, it did not much matter. He knew enough now, and in a very short time the bolt would fall, according to what Lane had told her.
Morrice had made up his mind what to do with it. Never in his life had he opened correspondence not intended for his perusal; never again, he hoped, would he be forced to resort to such a mean action. But everything was fair now; it was justifiable to meet cunning with cunning, duplicity with corresponding duplicity.
He opened that letter with the sure instinct that it would be of help to him, and he was not deceived. There was no address and no signature. Evidently the handwriting was too well known to Mrs. Morrice to require either. It was very brief; but even if he had not known what he already did, it would have revealed to him a great portion of what he had lately learned.
“A young man has been to see me, says he is not a professional detective, and doesn’t look like one, but very keen. Wanted to get out of me all about your early life. Of course, he got nothing.The worst is he seems to know something about Archie, knows that I brought him up. Be on your guard; I am afraid trouble is brewing.”
“A young man has been to see me, says he is not a professional detective, and doesn’t look like one, but very keen. Wanted to get out of me all about your early life. Of course, he got nothing.The worst is he seems to know something about Archie, knows that I brought him up. Be on your guard; I am afraid trouble is brewing.”
He put this damaging missive in his pocket along with the anonymous letter, and presently went up to his wife’s room to await her return to the home which, he had resolved, should no longer shelter a woman who had deceived him so grossly. He guessed at once the writer of this warning note—it could be none other than Alma Buckley, the friend of her youth. The reference to her having brought up the man known as Archie Brookes proved that beyond the possibility of doubt.
How long it seemed before the minutes passed and the door opened to admit the familiar figure! Preoccupied with her own thoughts, Mrs. Morrice hardly looked at her husband as she advanced to give him the perfunctory kiss which is one of the courtesies of a placid and unemotional married life.
But when he drew back with a gesture of something like repugnance from the proffered caress, she noted for the first time the terrible expression on his face, and was overcome with a deadly fear.
“What is the matter? Why are you looking like that?” she gasped in a trembling voice.
Consumed inwardly with fury as Morrice was, he exercised great control over himself. He knew that he would put himself at a disadvantage if he stormed and raged; he must overwhelm this wretched woman with the pitiless logic of the facts he had accumulated. He must act the part of the pitiless judge rather than that of the impassioned advocate.
He advanced to the door and turned the key, then came back to her and pointed to a chair. There was a cold and studied deliberation about his movements that filled her guilty soul with a fearful terror.
“Sit there while I speak to you,” he said in a harsh and grating voice. “You have much to account to me for. Read that.”
He drew the anonymous letter from his pocket and flung it in her lap.
Like one dazed, she drew it from the envelope with trembling fingers, and very slowly, for her thoughts were in terrible confusion, mastered its accusing contents. Then she looked up at him with a face from which all the colour had fled, leaving it ghastly to look at.
“It is a lie,” she stammered in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
“It is the truth,” he thundered, “and you are as shameless in the hour of your detection as you have been in your career of fraud and deceit.”
“Prove it,” she cried faintly, still feebly trying to oppose his gathering anger.
“You have lived with me a good many years,” he said witheringly, “and yet you know so little of me as to think I should speak like that if I were not sure I was on firm ground. And yet perhaps you have some excuse. I have been a blind fool so long that you were justified in your hopes I should continue blind to the end. Well, that letter opened my eyes. Your fortunate absence gave me facilities that it might have been difficult to create. I have taken several of the most valuable articles in your collection and had them examined. Need I tell you the result? Your guilty face shows plainly enough that you need no telling.”
And then her faint efforts at bravado broke down.
“Forgive me,” she moaned. “I yielded in a moment of temptation. Many women have done the same; they were my own property after all,” she added with a feeble effort at self-justification.
That answer only provoked him the more. “Amoment of temptation,” he repeated with scornful emphasis. “Rather many moments of temptation. This has been going on for years; these things were realized piece by piece. And now tell me—for I will have the truth out of you before you leave this room—where have these thousands gone, what have you got to show for them?”
It was a long time before she could steady her trembling lips to speak, and when she did the words were so low that he could only just catch them.
“Nothing. I have been a terribly extravagant woman. I have lost large sums of money at cards. You never guessed that I was a secret gambler—there is not a year in which I have not overstepped my allowance, generous as it was. I was afraid to come to you.”
He silenced her with a scornful wave of the hand. “Lies, lies, every word you have uttered! You have done none of these things you pretend; it is an excuse you have invented in your desperation.”
He drew himself up to his full height and pointed a menacing finger at the stricken woman. “Will you tell me where these thousands have gone? No, you are silent. Well then, I will tellyou—not in gambling debts, not in unnecessary personal luxuries—no, if it were so I would be readier to forgive. They have gone to support the extravagance of that wretched idler and spendthrift who is known by the name of Archie Brookes. Do you dare to deny it?”
She recognized that he knew too much, that further prevarication was useless. “I do not deny it,” she answered in a moaning voice.
And after a little pause he proceeded with his denunciation.
“It is as well that you do not, seeing I know everything. Well, bad as that is, there is worse behind. I have learned more; I know that you, in conjunctionwith that smooth scoundrel Clayton-Brookes, have practised upon me, upon all your friends, a gross and impudent fraud in passing off this young profligate as your nephew.”
She made a last attempt to defend her crumbling position. “Who dares to say that?” But her ashen lips, her trembling voice proved her guilt.
“You deceived me when I married you with a fictitious account of your family—the only truth in your many statements being that your father was a clever artist of dissolute habits. I know now that you were an only child and that your mother died when she gave you birth; it is therefore impossible you can have a nephew. The same applies to your confederate. He had no sisters, and his two brothers died bachelors. I would demand from you the motives of this fraud, but I know you will refuse to confess them. Well, I can wait. The people who have unmasked you so far will unmask you still farther, and in time I shall know all in spite of your obstinate silence.”
She said nothing for a long time. When she spoke it was in a voice of resigned despair. “What do you intend to do?”
In a cold, hard voice he delivered his inflexible sentence.
“From this day, from this hour, we are absolute strangers, and this roof can no longer shelter us both. I am not going to turn you out penniless—for your own small income is insufficient even for necessities—I will pay the penalty of my folly in having married you. Through my solicitors I will pay you an income sufficient to maintain you in decent comfort, but not enough for extravagance or for the maintenance of unscrupulous pensioners.”
She rose from her chair, half-tearful, half-defiant, but she did not attempt to dispute the justice ofthe sentence pronounced upon her. “When do you wish me to go?”
He handed her two envelopes, one containing the unsigned letter which he had opened, the other a bundle of notes.
“As soon as possible. Eat your last meal in this house if you wish. Here is something for immediate necessities; my solicitors will see to the rest. Take what you want for to-day and to-night; the rest of your property I will send later on to any address you give me.”
“And what is to be said to the world?” she interrupted in a broken voice.
“Ah, I had forgotten that, but it is already cut and dried in my mind. We will both tell the same tale; it will make curiosity silent if it does not altogether satisfy it. For years we have led an unhappy life through incompatibility of ideas and temperament; it has at last culminated in this. There is one other thing before we part for ever. That other letter which you will read is one addressed to you which I opened. It is from the friend of your youth, Alma Buckley, who brought up this impostor, and confirms the knowledge which I had already gained from another source.”
At those terrible words she seemed on the point of collapsing, but recovered herself with a strong effort. “I will go as soon as possible. You must hate the sight of me, I am sure of that.”
He did not contradict her statement. He was as pitiless as he had once been considerate and generous.
“When I believed that Richard Croxton had proved ungrateful and betrayed the trust I reposed in him, I told you what I then said to him. I repeat those words to you. I shall return here in about a couple of hours. When I re-enter this house, let me find it empty of your presence.”
He turned on his heel, unlocked the door and passed out, leaving the wretched woman alone to confront the ruin of her life, to face the punishment of her treachery.