It happened that the two men, waiting in the vestibule of the restaurant for Francis' car to crawl up to the entrance through the fog which had unexpectedly rolled up, heard the slight altercation which was afterwards referred to as preceding the tragedy. The two young people concerned were standing only a few feet away, the girl pretty, a little peevish, an ordinary type; her companion, whose boyish features were marred with dissipation, a very passable example of the young man about town going a little beyond his tether.
“It's no good standing here, Victor!” the girl exclaimed, frowning. “The commissionaire's been gone ages already, and there are two others before us for taxis.”
“We can't walk,” her escort replied gloomily. “It's a foul night. Nothing to do but wait, what? Let's go back and have another drink.”
The girl stamped her satin-shod foot impatiently.
“Don't be silly,” she expostulated. “You know I promised Clara we'd be there early.”
“All very well,” the young man grumbled, “but what can we do? We shall have to wait our turn.”
“Why can't you slip out and look for a taxi yourself?” she suggested. “Do, Victor,” she added, squeezing his arm. “You're so clever at picking them up.”
He made a little grimace, but lit a cigarette and turned up his coat collar.
“I'll do my best,” he promised. “Don't go on without me.”
“Try up towards Charing Cross Road, not the other way,” she advised earnestly.
“Right-oh!” he replied, which illuminative form of assent, a word spoken as he plunged unwillingly into the thick obscurity on the other side of the revolving doors, was probably the last he ever uttered on earth.
Left alone, the girl began to shiver, as though suddenly cold. She turned around and glanced hurriedly back into the restaurant. At that moment she met the steady, questioning scrutiny of Francis' eyes. She stood as though transfixed. Then came the sound which every one talked of for months afterwards, the sound which no one who heard it ever forgot—the death cry of Victor Bidlake, followed a second afterwards by a muffled report. A strain of frenzied surprise seemed mingled with the horror. Afterwards, silence.
There was the sound of some commotion outside, the sound of hurried footsteps and agitated voices. Then a terrible little procession appeared. Something—it seemed to be a shapeless heap of clothes—was carried in and laid upon the floor, in the little space between the revolving doors and the inner entrance. Two blue-liveried attendants kept back the horrified but curious crowd. Francis, vaguely recognised as being somehow or other connected with the law, was one of the few people allowed to remain whilst a doctor, fetched out from the dancing-room, kneeled over the prostrate form. He felt that he knew beforehand the horrible verdict which the latter whispered in his ear after his brief examination.
“Quite dead! A ghastly business!”
Francis gazed at the hole in the shirt-front, disfigured also by a scorching stain.
“A bullet?” he asked.
The doctor nodded.
“Fired within a foot of the poor fellow's heart,” he whispered. “The murderer wasn't taking any chances, whoever he was.”
“Have the police been sent for?”
The head-porter stepped forward.
“There was a policeman within a few yards of the spot, sir,” he replied. “He's gone down to keep every one away from the place where we found the body. We've telephoned to Scotland Yard for an inspector.”
The doctor rose to his feet.
“Nothing more can be done,” he pronounced. “Keep the people out of here whilst I go and fetch my hat and coat. Afterwards, I'll take the body to the mortuary when the ambulance arrives.”
An attendant pushed his way through the crowd of people on the inner side of the door.
“Miss Daisy Hyslop, young lady who was with Mr. Bidlake, has just fainted in the ladies' room, sir,” he announced. “Could you come?”
“I'll be there immediately,” the doctor promised.
The rest of the proceedings followed a normal course. The police arrived, took various notes, the ambulance followed a little later, the body was removed, and the little crowd of guests, still infected with a sort of awed excitement, were allowed to take their leave. Francis and Wilmore drove almost in silence to the former's rooms in Clarges Street.
“Come up and have a drink, Andrew,” Francis invited.
“I need it,” was the half-choked response.
Francis led the way in silence up the two flights of stairs into his sitting-room, mixed whiskies and sodas from the decanter and syphon which stood upon the sideboard, and motioned his friend to an easy-chair. Then he gave form to the thought which had been haunting them both.
“What about our friend Sir Timothy Brast?” he enquired. “Do you believe now that he was pulling our legs?”
Wilmore dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief. It was a chilly evening, but there were drops of perspiration still standing there.
“Francis,” he confessed, “it's horrible! I don't think realism like this attracts me. It's horrible! What are we going to do?”
“Nothing for the present,” was the brief reply. “If we were to tell our story, we should only be laughed at. What there is to be done falls to my lot.”
“Had the police anything to say about it?” Wilmore asked.
“Only a few words,” Francis replied. “Shopland has it in hand. A good man but unimaginative. I've come across him in one or two cases lately. You'll find a little bit like this in the papers to-morrow: 'The murder is believed to have been committed by one of the gang of desperadoes who have infested the west-end during the last few months.' You remember the assault in the Albany Court Yard, and the sandbagging in Shepherd Market only last week?”
“That seems to let Sir Timothy out,” Wilmore remarked.
“There are many motives for crime besides robbery,” Francis declared. “Don't be afraid, Andrew, that I am going to turn amateur detective and make the unravelment of this case all the more difficult for Scotland Yard. If I interfere, it will be on a certainty. Andrew, don't think I'm mad but I've taken up the challenge our great philanthropist flung at me to-night. I've very little interest in who killed this boy Victor Bidlake, or why, but I'm convinced of one thing—Brast knew about it, and if he is posing as a patron of crime on a great scale, sooner or later I shall get him. He may think himself safe, and he may have the courage of Beelzebub—he seems rather that type—but if my presentiment about him—comes true, his number's up. I can almost divine the meaning of his breaking in upon our conversation to-night. He needs an enemy—he is thirsting for danger. He has found it!”
Wilmore filled his pipe thoughtfully. At the first whiff of tobacco he began to feel more normal.
“After all, Francis,” he said, “aren't we a little overstrung to-night? Sir Timothy Brast is no adventurer. He is a prince in the city, a persona grata wherever he chooses to go. He isn't a hanger-on in Society. He isn't even dependent upon Bohemia for his entertainment. You can't seriously imagine that a man with his possessions is likely to risk his life and liberty in becoming the inspiration of a band of cutthroats?”
Francis smiled. He, too, had lit his pipe and had thrown himself into his favourite chair. He smiled confidently across at his friend.
“A millionaire with brains,” he argued, “is just the one person in the world likely to weary of all ordinary forms of diversion. I begin to remember things about him already. Haven't you heard about his wonderful parties down at The Walled House?”
Wilmore struck the table by his side with his clenched fist.
“By George, that's it!” he exclaimed. “Who hasn't!”
“I remember Baker talking about one last year,” Francis continued, “never any details, but all kinds of mysterious hints—a sort of mixture between a Roman orgy and a chapter from the 'Arabian Nights'—singers from Petrograd, dancers from Africa and fighting men from Chicago.”
“The fellow's magnificent, at any rate,” Wilmore remarked.
His host smoked furiously for a moment.
“That's the worst of these multi-millionaires,” he declared. “They think they can rule the world, traffic in human souls, buy morals, mock at the law. We shall see!”
“Do you know the thing that I found most interesting about him?” Wilmore asked.
“His black opals,” the other suggested. “You're by the way of being a collector, aren't you?”
Wilmore shook his head.
“The fact that he is the father of Oliver Hilditch's widow.”
Francis sat quite still for a moment. There was a complete change in his expression. He looked like a man who has received a shock.
“I forgot that,” he muttered.
Francis met Shopland one morning about a week later, on his way from Clarges Street to his chambers in the Temple. The detective raised his hat and would have passed on, but Francis accosted him.
“Any progress, Mr. Shopland?” he enquired.
The detective fingered his small, sandy moustache. He was an insignificant-looking little man, undersized, with thin frame and watery eyes. His mouth, however, was hard, and there were some tell-tale little lines at its corners.
“None whatever, I am sorry to say, Mr. Ledsam,” he admitted. “At present we are quite in the dark.”
“You found the weapon, I hear?”
Shopland nodded.
“It was just an ordinary service revolver, dating from the time of the war, exactly like a hundred thousand others. The enquiries we were able to make from it came to nothing.”
“Where was it picked up?”
“In the middle of the waste plot of ground next to Soto's. The murderer evidently threw it there the moment he had discharged it. He must have been wearing rubber-soled shoes, for not a soul heard him go.”
Francis nodded thoughtfully.
“I wonder,” he said, after a slight pause, “whether it ever occurred to you to interview Miss Daisy Hyslop, the young lady who was with Bidlake on the night of his murder?”
“I called upon her the day afterwards,” the detective answered.
“She had nothing to say?”
“Nothing whatever.”
“Indirectly, of course,” Francis continued, “the poor girl was the cause of his death. If she had not insisted upon his going out for a taxicab, the man who was loitering about would probably have never got hold of him.”
The detective glanced up furtively at the speaker. He seemed to reflect for a moment.
“I gathered,” he said, “in conversation with the commissionaire, that Miss Hyslop was a little impatient that night. It seems, however, that she was anxious to get to a ball which was being given down in Kensington.”
“There was a ball, was there?” Francis asked.
“Without a doubt,” the detective replied. “It was given by a Miss Clara Bultiwell. She happens to remember urging Miss Hyslop to come on as early as possible.”
“So that's that,” Francis observed.
“Just so, Mr. Ledsam,” the detective murmured.
They were walking along the Mall now, eastwards. The detective, who seemed to have been just a saunterer, had accommodated himself to Francis' destination.
“Let me see, there was nothing stolen from the young man's person, was there?” Francis asked presently.
“Apparently nothing at all, sir.”
“And I gather that you have made every possible enquiry as to the young man's relations with his friends?”
“So far as one can learn, sir, they seem to have been perfectly amicable.”
“Of course,” Francis remarked presently, “this may have been quite a purposeless affair. The deed may have been committed by a man who was practically a lunatic, without any motive or reason whatever.”
“Precisely so, sir,” the detective agreed.
“But, all the same, I don't think it was.”
“Neither do I, sir.”
Francis smiled slightly.
“Shopland,” he said, “if there is no further external evidence to be collected, I suggest that there is only one person likely to prove of assistance to you.”
“And that one person, sir?”
“Miss Daisy Hyslop.”
“The young lady whom I have already seen?”
Francis nodded.
“The young lady whom you have already seen,” he assented. “At the same time, Mr. Shopland, we must remember this. If Miss Hyslop has any knowledge of the facts which are behind Mr. Bidlake's murder, it is more likely to be to her interest to keep them to herself, than to give them away to the police free gratis and for nothing. Do you follow me?”
“Precisely, sir.”
“That being so,” Francis continued, “I am going to make a proposition to you for what it is worth. Where were you going when I met you this morning, Shopland?”
“To call upon you in Clarges Street, sir.”
“What for?”
“I was going to ask you if you would be so kind as to call upon Miss Daisy Hyslop, sir.”
Francis smiled.
“Great minds,” he murmured. “I will see the young lady this afternoon, Shopland.”
The detective raised his hat. They had reached the spot where his companion turned off by the Horse Guards Parade.
“I may hope to hear from you, then, sir?”
“Within the course of a day or two, perhaps earlier,” Francis promised.
Francis continued his walk along the Embankment to his chambers in the Temple. He glanced in the outer office as he passed to his consulting room.
“Anything fresh, Angrave?” he asked his head-clerk.
“Nothing whatever, sir,” was the quiet reply.
He passed on to his own den—a bare room with long windows looking out over the gardens. He glanced at the two or three letters which lay on his desk, none of them of the least interest, and leaning back in his chair commenced to fill his pipe. There was a knock at the door. Fawsitt, a young beginner at the bar, in whom he had taken some interest and who deviled for him, presented himself.
“Can I have a word with you, Mr. Ledsam?” he asked.
“By all means,” was the prompt response. “Sit down.”
Fawsitt seated himself on the other side of the table. He had a long, thin face, dark, narrow eyes, unwholesome complexion, a slightly hooked nose, and teeth discoloured through constant smoking. His fingers, too, bore the tell-tale yellow stains.
“Mr. Ledsam,” he said, “I think, with your permission, I should like to leave at the end of my next three months.”
Francis glanced across at him.
“Sorry to hear that, Fawsitt. Are you going to work for any one else?”
“I haven't made arrangements yet, sir,” the young man replied. “I thought of offering myself to Mr. Barnes.”
“Why do you want to leave me?” Francis asked.
“There isn't enough for me to do, sir.”
Francis lit his pipe.
“It's probably just a lull, Fawsitt,” he remarked.
“I don't think so, sir.”
“The devil! You've been gossiping with some of these solicitors' clerks, Fawsitt.”
“I shouldn't call it gossiping, sir. I am always interested to hear anything that may concern our—my future. I have reason to believe, sir, that we are being passed over for briefs.”
“The reason being?”
“One can't pick and choose, sir. One shouldn't, anyway.”
Francis smiled.
“You evidently don't approve of any measure of personal choice as to the work which one takes up.”
“Certainly I do not, sir, in our profession. The only brief I would refuse would be a losing or an ill-paid one. I don't conceive it to be our business to prejudge a case.”
“I see,” Francis murmured. “Go on, Fawsitt.”
“There's a rumour about,” the young man continued, “that you are only going to plead where the chances are that your client is innocent.”
“There's some truth in that,” Francis admitted.
“If I could leave a little before the three months, sir, I should be glad,” Fawsitt said. “I look at the matter from an entirely different point of view.”
“You shall leave when you like, of course, Fawsitt, but tell me what that point of view is?”
“Just this, sir. The simplest-minded idiot who ever stammered through his address, can get an innocent prisoner off if he knows enough of the facts and the law. To my mind, the real triumph in our profession is to be able to unwind the meshes of damning facts and force a verdict for an indubitably guilty client.”
“How does the moral side of that appeal to you?” his senior enquired.
“I didn't become a barrister to study morals, or even to consider them,” was the somewhat caustic reply. “When once a brief is in my mind, it is a matter of brain, cunning and resource. The guiltier a man, the greater the success if you can get him off.”
“And turn him loose again upon Society?”
“It isn't our job to consider that, sir. The moral question is only confusing in the matter. Our job is to make use of the law for the benefit of our client. That's what we're paid for. That's the measure of our success or failure.”
Francis nodded.
“Very reasonably put, Fawsitt,” he conceded. “I'll give you a letter to Barnes whenever you like.”
“I should be glad if you would do so, sir,” the young man said. “I'm only wasting my time here....”
Francis wrote a letter of recommendation to Barnes, the great K.C., considered a stray brief which had found its way in, and strolled up towards the Milan as the hour approached luncheon-time. In the American bar of that palatial hotel he found the young man he was looking for—a flaxen-haired youth who was seated upon one of the small tables, with his feet upon a chair, laying down the law to a little group of acquaintances. He greeted Francis cordially but without that due measure of respect which nineteen should accord to thirty-five.
“Cheerio, my elderly relative!” he exclaimed. “Have a cocktail.”
Francis nodded assent.
“Come into this corner with me for a moment, Charles,” he invited. “I have a word for your ear.”
The young man rose and sat by his uncle's side on a settee.
“In my declining years,” the latter began, “I find myself reverting to the follies of youth. I require a letter of introduction from you to a young lady of your acquaintance.”
“The devil! Not one of my own special little pets, I hope?”
“Her name is Miss Daisy Hyslop,” Francis announced.
Lord Charles Southover pursed his lips and whistled. He glanced at Francis sideways.
“Is this the beginning of a campaign amongst the butterflies,” he enquired, “because, if so, I feel it my duty, uncle, to address to you a few words of solemn warning. Miss Daisy Hyslop is hot stuff.”
“Look here, young fellow,” Francis said equably, “I don't know what the state of your exchequer is—”
“I owe you forty,” Lord Charles interrupted. “Spring another tenner, make it fifty, that is, and the letter of introduction I will write for you will bring tears of gratitude to your eyes.”
“I'll spring the tenner,” Francis promised, “but you'll write just what I tell you—no more and no less.”
“Anything extra for keeping mum at home?” the young man ventured tentatively.
“You're a nice sort of nephew to have!” Francis declared. “Abandon these futile attempts at blackmail and just come this way to the writing-table.”
“You've got the tenner with you?” the young man asked anxiously.
Francis produced a well-filled pocketbook. His nephew led the way to a writing-table, lit a cigarette which he stuck into the corner of his mouth, and in painstaking fashion wrote the few lines which Francis dictated. The ten pounds changed hands.
“Have one with me for luck?” the young man invited brightly. “No? Perhaps you're right,” he added, in valedictory fashion. “You'd better keep your head clear for Daisy!”
Miss Daisy Hyslop received Francis that afternoon, in the sitting-room of her little suite at the Milan. Her welcoming smile was plaintive and a little subdued, her manner undeniably gracious. She was dressed in black, a wonderful background for her really gorgeous hair, and her deportment indicated a recent loss.
“How nice of you to come and see me,” she murmured, with a lingering touch of the fingers. “Do take that easy-chair, please, and sit down and talk to me. Your roses were beautiful, but whatever made you send them to me?”
“Impulse,” he answered.
She laughed softly.
“Then please yield to such impulses as often as you feel them,” she begged. “I adore flowers. Just now, too,” she added, with a little sigh, “anything is welcome which helps to keep my mind off my own affairs.”
“It was very good of you to let me come,” he declared. “I can quite understand that you don't feel like seeing many people just now.”
Francis' manner, although deferential and courteous, had nevertheless some quality of aloofness in it to which she was unused and which she was quick to recognise. The smile, faded from her face. She seemed suddenly not quite so young.
“Haven't I seen you before somewhere quite lately?” she asked, a little sharply.
“You saw me at Soto's, the night that Victor Bidlake was murdered,” he reminded her. “I stood quite close to you both while you were waiting for your taxi.”
The animation evoked by this call from a presumably new admirer, suddenly left her. She became nervous and constrained. She glanced again at his card.
“Don't tell me,” she begged, “that you have come to ask me any questions about that night! I simply could not bear it. The police have been here twice, and I had nothing to tell them, absolutely nothing.”
“Quite right,” he assented soothingly. “Police have such a clumsy way of expecting valuable information for nothing. I'm always glad to hear of their being disappointed.”
She studied her visitor for a moment carefully. Then she turned to the table by her side, picked up a note and read it through.
“Lord Southover tells me here,” she said, “that you are just a pal of his who wants to make my acquaintance. He doesn't say why.”
“Is that necessary?” Francis asked good-naturedly.
She moved in her chair a little nervously, crossing and uncrossing her legs more than once. Her white silk stockings underneath her black skirt were exceedingly effective, a fact of which she never lost consciousness, although at that moment she was scarcely inspired to play the coquette.
“I'd like to think it wasn't,” she admitted frankly.
“I've seen you repeatedly upon the stage,” he told her, “and, though musical comedy is rather out of my line, I have always admired you immensely.”
She studied him once more almost wistfully.
“You look very nice,” she acknowledged, “but you don't look at all the kind of man who admires girls who do the sort of rubbish I do on the stage.”
“What do I look like?” he asked, smiling.
“A man with a purpose,” she answered.
“I begin to think,” he ventured, “that we shall get on. You are really a very astute young lady.”
“You are quite sure you're not one of these amateur detectives one reads about?” she demanded.
“Certainly not,” he assured her. “I will confess that I am interested in Victor Bidlake's death, and I should like to discover the truth about it, but I have a reason for that which I may tell you some day. It has nothing whatever to do with the young man himself. To the best of my belief, I never saw or heard of him before in my life. My interest lies with another person. You have lost a great friend, I know. If you felt disposed to tell me the whole story, it might make such a difference.”
She sighed. Her confidence was returning—also her self-pity. The latter at once betrayed itself.
“You see,” she confided, “Victor and I were engaged to be married, so naturally I let him help me a little. I shan't be able to stay on here now. They are bothering me about their bill already,” she added, with a side-glance at an envelope which stood on a table by her side.
He drew a little nearer to her.
“Miss Hyslop—” he began.
“Daisy,” she interrupted.
“Miss Daisy Hyslop, then,” he continued, smiling, “I suggested just now that I did not want to come and bother you for information without any return. If I can be of any assistance to you in that matter,” he added, glancing towards the envelope, “I shall be very pleased.”
She sighed gratefully.
“Just till Victor's people return to town,” she said. “I know that they mean to do something for me.”
“How much?” he asked.
“Two hundred pounds would keep me going,” she told him.
He wrote out a cheque. Miss Hyslop drew a sigh of relief as she laid it on one side with the envelope. Then she swung round in her chair to face him where he sat at the writing-table.
“I am afraid you will think that what I have to tell is very insignificant,” she confessed. “Victor was one of those boys who always fancied themselves bored. He was bored with polo, bored with motoring, bored with the country and bored with town. Then quite suddenly during the last few weeks he seemed changed. All that he would tell me was that he had found a new interest in life. I don't know what it was but I don't think it was a nice one. He seemed to drop all his old friends, too, and go about with a new set altogether—not a nice set at all. He used to stay out all night, and he quite gave up going to dances and places where he could take me. Once or twice he came here in the afternoon, dead beat, without having been to bed at all, and before he could say half-a-dozen words he was asleep in my easy-chair. He used to mutter such horrible things that I had to wake him up.”
“Was he ever short of money?” Francis asked.
She shook her head.
“Not seriously,” she answered. “He was quite well-off, besides what his people allowed him. I was going to have a wonderful settlement as soon as our engagement was announced. However, to go on with what I was telling you, the very night before—it happened—he came in to see me, looking like nothing on earth. He cried like a baby, behaved like a lunatic, and called himself all manner of names. He had had a great deal too much to drink, and I gathered that he had seen something horrible. It was then he asked me to dine with him the next night, and told me that he was going to break altogether with his new friends. Something in connection with them seemed to have given him a terrible fright.”
Francis nodded. He had the tact to abandon his curiosity at this precise point.
“The old story,” he declared, “bad company and rotten habits. I suppose some one got to know that the young man usually carried a great deal of money about with him.”
“It was so foolish of him,” she assented eagerly: “I warned him about it so often. The police won't listen to it but I am absolutely certain that he was robbed. I noticed when he paid the bill that he had a great wad of bank-notes which were never discovered afterwards.”
Francis rose to his feet.
“What are you doing to-night?” he enquired.
“Nothing,” she acknowledged eagerly.
“Then let's dine somewhere and see the show at the Frivolity,” he suggested.
“You dear man!” she assented with enthusiasm. “The one thing I wanted to do, and the one person I wanted to do it with.”
It was after leaving Miss Daisy Hyslop's flat that the event to which Francis Ledsam had been looking forward more than anything else in the world, happened. It came about entirely by chance. There were no taxis in the Strand. Francis himself had finished work for the day, and feeling disinclined for his usual rubber of bridge, he strolled homewards along the Mall. At the corner of Green Park, he came face to face with the woman who for the last few months had scarcely been out of his thoughts. Even in that first moment he realised to his pain that she would have avoided him if she could. They met, however, where the path narrowed, and he left her no chance to avoid him. That curious impulse of conventionality which opens a conversation always with cut and dried banalities, saved them perhaps from a certain amount of embarrassment. Without any conscious suggestion, they found themselves walking side by side.
“I have been wanting to see you very much indeed,” he said. “I even went so far as to wonder whether I dared call.”
“Why should you?” she asked. “Our acquaintance began and ended in tragedy. There is scarcely any purpose in carrying it further.”
He looked at her for a moment before replying. She was wearing black, but scarcely the black of a woman who sorrows. She was still frigidly beautiful, redolent, in all the details of her toilette, of that almost negative perfection which he had learnt to expect from her. She suggested to him still that same sense of aloofness from the actualities of life.
“I prefer not to believe that it is ended,” he protested. “Have you so many friends that you have no room for one who has never consciously done you any harm?”
She looked at him with some faint curiosity in her immobile features.
“Harm? No! On the contrary, I suppose I ought to thank you for your evidence at the inquest.”
“Some part of it was the truth,” he replied.
“I suppose so,” she admitted drily. “You told it very cleverly.”
He looked her in the eyes.
“My profession helped me to be a good witness,” he said. “As for the gist of my evidence, that was between my conscience and myself.”
“Your conscience?” she repeated. “Are there really men who possess such things?”
“I hope you will discover that for yourself some day,” he answered. “Tell me your plans? Where are you living?”
“For the present with my father in Curzon Street.”
“With Sir Timothy Brast?”
She assented.
“You know him?” she asked indifferently.
“Very slightly,” Francis replied. “We talked together, some nights ago, at Soto's Restaurant. I am afraid that I did not make a very favourable impression upon him. I gathered, too, that he has somewhat eccentric tastes.”
“I do not see a great deal of my father,” she said. “We met, a few months ago, for the first time since my marriage, and things have been a little difficult between us—just at first. He really scarcely ever puts in an appearance at Curzon Street. I dare say you have heard that he makes a hobby of an amazing country house which he has down the river.”
“The Walled House?” he ventured.
She nodded.
“I see you have heard of it. All London, they tell me, gossips about the entertainments there.”
“Are they really so wonderful?” he asked.
“I have never been to one,” she replied. “As a matter of fact, I have spent scarcely any time in England since my marriage. My husband, as I remember he told you, was fond of travelling.”
Notwithstanding the warm spring air he was conscious of a certain chilliness. Her level, indifferent tone seemed to him almost abnormally callous. A horrible realisation flashed for a moment in his brain. She was speaking of the man whom she had killed!
“Your father overheard a remark of mine,” Francis told her. “I was at Soto's with a friend—Andrew Wilmore, the novelist—and to tell you the truth we were speaking of the shock I experienced when I realised that I had been devoting every effort of which I was capable, to saving the life of—shall we say a criminal? Your father heard me say, in rather a flamboyant manner, perhaps, that in future I declared war against all crime and all criminals.”
She smiled very faintly, a smile which had in it no single element of joy or humour.
“I can quite understand my father intervening,” she said. “He poses as being rather a patron of artistically-perpetrated crime. Sue is his favourite author, and I believe that he has exceedingly grim ideas as to duelling and fighting generally. He was in prison once for six months at New Orleans for killing a man who insulted my mother. Nothing in the world would ever have convinced him that he had not done a perfectly legitimate thing.”
“I am expecting to find him quite an interesting study, when I know him better,” Francis pronounced. “My only fear is that he will count me an unfriendly person and refuse to have anything to do with me.”
“I am not at all sure,” she said indifferently, “that it would not be very much better for you if he did.”
“I cannot admit that,” he answered, smiling. “I think that our paths in life are too far apart for either of us to influence the other. You don't share his tastes, do you?”
“Which ones?” she asked, after a moment's silence.
“Well, boxing for one,” he replied. “They tell me that he is the greatest living patron of the ring, both here and in America.”
“I have never been to a fight in my life,” she confessed. “I hope that I never may.”
“I can't go so far as that,” he declared, “but boxing isn't altogether one of my hobbies. Can't we leave your father and his tastes alone for the present? I would rather talk about—ourselves. Tell me what you care about most in life?”
“Nothing,” she answered listlessly.
“But that is only a phase,” he persisted. “You have had terrible trials, I know, and they must have affected your outlook on life, but you are still young, and while one is young life is always worth having.”
“I thought so once,” she assented. “I don't now.”
“But there must be—there will be compensations,” he assured her. “I know that just now you are suffering from the reaction—after all you have gone through. The memory of that will pass.”
“The memory of what I have gone through will never pass,” she answered.
There was a moment's intense silence, a silence pregnant with reminiscent drama. The little room rose up before his memory—the woman's hopeless, hating eyes, the quivering thread of steel, the dead man's mocking words. He seemed at that moment to see into the recesses of her mind. Was it remorse that troubled her, he wondered? Did she lack strength to realise that in that half-hour at the inquest he had placed on record for ever his judgment of her deed? Even to think of it now was morbid. Although he would never have confessed it even to himself, there was growing daily in his mind some idea of reward. She had never thanked him—he hoped that she never would—but he had surely a right to claim some measure of her thoughts, some light place in her life.
“Please look at me,” he begged, a little abruptly.
She turned her head in some surprise. Francis was almost handsome in the clear Spring sunlight, his face alight with animation, his deep-set grey eyes full of amused yet anxious solicitude. Even as she appreciated these things and became dimly conscious of his eager interest, her perturbation seemed to grow.
“Well?” she ventured.
“Do I look like a person who knew what he was talking about?” he asked.
“On the whole, I should say that you did,” she admitted.
“Very well, then,” he went on cheerfully, “believe me when I say that the shadow which depresses you all the time now will pass. I say this confidently,” he added, his voice softening, “because I hope to be allowed to help. Haven't you guessed that I am very glad indeed to see you again?”
She came to a sudden standstill. They had just passed through Lansdowne Passage and were in the quiet end of Curzon Street.
“But you must not talk to me like that!” she expostulated.
“Why not?” he demanded. “We have met under strange and untoward circumstances, but are you so very different from other women?”
For a single moment she seemed infinitely more human, startled, a little nervous, exquisitely sympathetic to an amazing and unexpected impression. She seemed to look with glad but terrified eyes towards the vision of possible things—and then to realise that it was but a trick of the fancy and to come shivering back to the world of actualities.
“I am very different,” she said quietly. “I have lived my life. What I lack in years has been made up to me in horror. I have no desire now but to get rid of this aftermath of years as smoothly and quickly as possible. I do not wish any man, Mr. Ledsam, to talk to me as you are doing.”
“You will not accept my friendship?”
“It is impossible,” she replied.
“May I be allowed to call upon you?” he went on, doggedly.
“I do not receive visitors,” she answered.
They were walking slowly up Curzon Street now. She had given him every opportunity to leave her, opportunities to which he was persistently blind. Her obstinacy had been a shock to him.
“I am sorry,” he said, “but I cannot accept my dismissal like this. I shall appeal to your father. However much he may dislike me, he has at least common-sense.”
She looked at him with a touch of the old horror in her coldly-questioning eyes.
“In your way you have been kind to me,” she admitted. “Let me in return give you a word of advice. Let me beg you to have nothing whatever to do with my father, in friendship or in enmity. Either might be equally disastrous. Either, in the long run, is likely to cost you dear.”
“If that is your opinion of your father, why do you live with him?” he asked.
She had become entirely callous again. Her smile, with its mocking quality, reminded him for a moment of the man whom they were discussing.
“Because I am a luxury and comfort-loving parasite,” she answered deliberately, “because my father gladly pays my accounts at Lucille and Worth and Reville, because I have never learnt to do without things. And please remember this. My father, so far as I am concerned, has no faults. He is a generous and courteous companion. Nevertheless, number 70 b, Curzon Street is no place for people who desire to lead normal lives.”
And with that she was gone. Her gesture of dismissal was so complete and final that he had no courage for further argument. He had lost her almost as soon as he had found her.