'The latter statements,' observed Lady Blixworth complacently, 'are at the present moment true. As for the former—oh, Peggy, Peggy!'
She was, in fact, rather hurt. A refusal to betray one friend is usually considered a reflection on the discretion of another.
Forty-eight hours had passed since Peggy Ryle fled from Danes Inn. How they had gone Airey Newton could scarcely tell; as he looked back, they seemed to hold little except the ever-reiterated cry, 'The shame of it—you're rich!' But still the contents of the safe were intact, and no entries had been cancelled in the red-leather book. A dozen times he had taken the book, looked through it, and thrown it from him again. A clash of passions filled him; the old life he had chosen, with its strange, strong, secret delight and its sense of hidden power, fought against the new suggestion. It was no longer of much moment to him that Peggy knew or that it was Peggy's voice which had cried out the bitter reproach. These things now seemed accidental. Peggy or another—it mattered little.
Yet he had sent for Tommy Trent, and reproached him; he was eager to reproach anybody besides himself.
'I told nobody,' protested Tommy, in indignant surprise. Then the thought flashed on him. 'Was it Peggy?' he asked incredulously. Airey's nod started all the story. His view was what Peggy had foreseen; he found no arguments to weigh against that breaking of her word which had made him seem a traitor in the eyes of his friend.
'A woman setting the world right is the most unscrupulous thing in the world,' he declared angrily. 'You believe I never meant to break faith, old fellow? I shall have it out with her, you may be sure.' He paused and then added, 'I can't believe she'll let it go any further, you know.'
To that also Airey seemed more than half-indifferent now; the old furtive solicitude for his secret, the old shame lest it should escape, seemed to be leaving him, or at least to be losing half their force, in face of some greater thing in his mind. He had himself to deal with now—what he was, not what was said or thought of him. But he did not intercede with Tommy's sternness against Peggy; he let it pass.
'I don't blame you. It's done now. You'd better leave me alone,' he said.
Tommy went and sought Peggy with wrath in his heart; but for all these two days she was obstinately invisible. She was not to be found in Harriet Street, and none of her circle had seen her. It may be surmised that she wandered desolately through fashionable gatherings and haunts of amusement, slinking home late at night. It is certain that she did not wish to meet Tommy Trent, that she would not for the world have encountered Airey Newton. There seemed to be gunpowder in the air of all familiar places; in the reaction of fear after her desperate venture Peggy withdrew herself to the safety of the unknown.
Airey sat waiting, his eyes constantly looking to the clock. Trix was coming to see him; she had written that she needed advice, and that he was the only friend she had to turn to in such a matter. 'Peggy is no use to me in the particular way I want help, and I have something to tell which I could tell to nobody but her or you.' He knew what she had to tell; the fact that she came to tell it to him was proof positive that she had heard nothing from Peggy. He had not forbidden her coming. Though it might be agony to him, yet he willed that she should come; beyond that point his will was paralysed.
In dainty and costly garb she came, still the vision of riches which had first struck his eyes when he saw her at the beginning of her campaign in London; yet though this was her outward seeming, her air and manner raised in him a remoter memory, bringing back to mind the pathetic figure at the Paris hotel. It was easy to see that she held nosecret of his, and that he had no reproach to fear. Her burden lay in her own secret that she must tell, in the self-reproach against which she had no defence. Of neither part of Peggy's double treachery had she any suspicion.
'Long ago I told you I should come if I got into trouble. Here I am!' Her effort at gaiety was tremulous and ill-sustained.
'Yes, I know you've been in trouble.'
'Oh, I don't mean that. That's all over. It's something else. Will you listen? It's not easy to say.'
He gave her a chair and stood by the mantelpiece himself, leaning his elbow on it and his chin on his hand. For a minute or two he did not attend to her; his mind flew back to his own life, to his past work and its success, to those fruits of success which had come to usurp the place not merely of success but of the worthy work itself. She had been stammering out the first part of her story for some while before he turned to her and listened, with sombre eyes set on her nervous face. At that instant she seemed to him an enemy. She had come to rob him. Why should he be robbed because this woman had been a fool? So put, the argument sounded strong and sensible; it made short work of sentimentality. If he sent her away empty, what harm was done? Tommy Trent would think as he had always thought—no less, no worse. For the rest, it was only to take just offence with the girl who had put him to shame, and to see her no more. The old life, the old delight, held out alluring arms to him.
Trix Trevalla stumbled on, all unconscious of the great battle that she fought for another, anxious only to tell her story truthfully, and yet not so as to seem a creature too abject.
'That's the end of it,' she said at last with a woeful smile. 'After Glowing Stars and the other debts, I may have forty shillings a week or thereabouts. But I want to show you my investments, and I want you to tell me what I ought to sell and what few I might best try to keep. Everypound makes a difference, you know.' The intense conviction of a convert spoke in the concluding words.
'Why do you think I know about such things?'
'Oh, I daresay Mr. Trent would know better, but I couldn't make up my mind to tell him. And I've no right to bother him. I seem to have a right to bother you, somehow.' She smiled again for an instant, and raised her eyes to his. 'Because of what you said at Paris! You remember?'
'You hold me responsible still, I see.'
'Oh, that's our old joke,' she said, fearing to seem too serious in her fanciful claim. 'But still it does always seem to me that we've been in it together; all through it your words have kept coming back, and I've thought of you here. I think you were always in my mind. Well, that's foolish. Anyhow you'll tell me what you think?'
'At least I didn't tell you to trust Fricker.'
'Please don't,' she implored. 'That's the worst of all. That's the thing I can't bear to think of. I thought myself a match for him. And now——!' Her outspread hands accepted any scornful description.
She came to him and put into his hand a paper on which she had drawn up some sort of a statement of her ventures, of her debts, and of her position as she understood it. He took it and glanced through it.
'Heavens, how you spent money!' he exclaimed, in involuntary horror.
She blushed painfully: could she point out how little that had mattered when she was going to be Lady Mervyn?
'And the losses in speculation! You seem never to have been in anything sound!'
'They deceived me,' she faltered. 'Oh, I know all that! Must you say that again? Tell me—what will there be left? Will there be enough to—to exist upon? Or must I'—she broke into a smile of ridicule—'or must I try to work?'
There was a pathetic absurdity about the suggestion. Airey's gruff laugh relieved the sternness of his indignation.
'Yes, I've shown such fine practical talents, haven't I?' she asked forlornly.
'You were very extravagant, but you'd have been in a tolerable position but for Fricker. Dramoffskys and Glowing Stars between them have done the mischief.'
'Yes. If I hadn't cheated him, and he hadn't cheated me in return, I should have been in a tolerable position. But I knew that before I came here, Mr. Newton.'
'Well, it's the truth,' he persisted, looking at her grimly over the top of the paper.
'You needn't repeat it,' she flashed out indignantly. Then her tone changed suddenly. 'Forgive me; it's so hard to hear the truth sometimes, to know it's true, to have nothing to answer.'
'Yes, it is hard sometimes,' Airey agreed.
'Oh, you don't know. You've not cheated and been cheated; you've had nothing to conceal, nothing to lie about, nothing that you dreaded being found out in.' She wrung her hands despairingly.
'I've warned you before now not to idealise me.'
'I can't help it. I believe even your Paris advice was all right, if I'd understood it rightly. You didn't mean that I was to think only of myself and nothing of anybody else, to do nothing for anyone, to share nothing with anyone. You meant I was to make other people happy too, didn't you?'
'I don't know what I meant,' he growled, as he laid her paper on the mantelpiece.
Trix wandered to the window and sat down in the chair generally appropriated to Peggy Ryle.
'I'm sick of myself,' she said.
'A self's not such an easy thing to get rid of, though.'
She glanced at him with some constraint. 'I'm afraid I'm bothering you? I really have no right to make youdoleful over my follies. You've kept out of it all yourself; I needn't drag you into it.' She rose as if she would go. Airey Newton stood motionless. It seemed as though he would let her leave him without a word.
She had not in her heart believed that he would. She in her turn stood still for a moment. When he made no sign, she raised her head in proud resentment; her voice was cold and offended. 'I'm sorry I troubled you, Mr. Newton.' She began to walk towards the door, passing him on the way. Suddenly he sprang forward and caught her by the hands.
'Don't go!' he said in a peremptory yet half-stifled whisper.
Trix's eyes filled with tears. 'I thought you couldn't really mean to do that,' she murmured. 'Oh, think of what it is, think of it! What's left for me?'
He had loosed her hands as quickly as he had caught them, and she clasped them in entreaty.
'I'm neither bad enough nor good enough. I tried to marry for position and money. I was bad enough to do that. I wasn't bad enough to go on telling the lies. Oh, I began! Now I'm not good enough or brave enough to face what I've brought myself to. And yet it would kill me to be bad enough and degraded enough to take the only way out.'
'What way do you mean?'
'I can't tell you about that,' she said. 'I should be too ashamed. But some day you may hear I've done it. How am I to resist? Is it worth resisting? Am I worth saving at all?'
She had never seemed to him so much worth saving. And he knew that he could save her, if he would pay the price. He guessed, too, what she hinted at; there was only one thing that a woman like her could speak of as at once a refuge and a degradation, as a thing that killed her and yet a thing that she might come to do. Peggy Ryle had told him that he loved her, and he hadnot denied it then. Still less could he deny it now, with the woman herself before him in living presence.
She saw that he had guessed what was in her mind.
'Men can't understand women doing that sort of thing, I know,' she went on. 'I suppose it strikes them with horror. They don't understand what it is to be helpless.' Her voice shook. 'I've had a great deal of hardship, and I can't bear it any more. I'm a coward in the end, I suppose. My gleam of good days has made me a coward at the thought of bad ones again.' She added, after a pause, 'You'll look at the statement and let me know what you think, won't you? It might just make all the difference.' Again she paused. 'It seems funny to stand here and tell you that, if necessary, I shall probably sell myself; that's what it comes to. But you know so much about me already, and—and I know you'd like me if—if it was humanly possible to do anything except despise me. Wouldn't you? So do look carefully at the paper and go into the figures, please. Because I—even I—don't want to sell myself for money.'
What else was he doing with himself? The words hit home. If the body were sold, did not the soul pass too? If the soul were bartered, what value was it to keep the body? Peggy had begged him to save this woman pain; unconsciously she herself asked a greater rescue than that. And she offered him, still all unconsciously, a great salvation. Was it strange that she should talk of selling herself for money? Then was it not strange too that he had been doing that very thing for years, and had done it of deliberate choice, under the stress of no fear and of no necessity? The picture of himself that had been dim, that Tommy Trent had always refused to make clearer, that even Peggy Ryle's passionate reproach had left still but half-revealed, suddenly stood out before his eyes plain and sharp in every outline. He felt that it was a thing to be loathed.
She saw his face stern and contracted with the pain of his thoughts.
'Yes, I've told you all the truth about myself, and that's how you look!' she said.
He smiled bitterly at her mistake, and fixed his eyes on her as he asked:—
'Could you change a man, if you gave yourself to him? Could you drive out his devil, and make a new man of him? Could you give him a new life, a new heart, a new character?'
'I should have no such hopes. My eyes would be quite open.' Her thoughts were on Beaufort Chance.
'No, but couldn't you?' he urged, with a wistful persistence. 'If you knew the worst of him and would still look for something good—something you could love and could use to make the rest better? Couldn't you make him cease being what he hated being? Couldn't you have a power greater than the power of the enemy in him? If you loved him, I mean.'
'How could I love him?' she asked wonderingly.
'If he loved you?'
'What does such a man mean by love?' she murmured scornfully.
'I wonder if you could do anything like that,' he went on. 'Women have, I suppose. Could you?'
'Oh, don't talk about the thing. I hope I may have courage to throw it aside.'
He started a little. 'Ah, you mean—— No, I was thinking of something else.'
'And how could such a woman as I am make any man better?' She smiled in a faint ridicule of the idea; but she ceased to think of leaving him, and sat down by the table. For the moment he seemed to pay little attention to where she was or what she did; he spoke to her indeed, but his air was absent and his eyes aloof.
'Because, if the woman couldn't, if it turned out that she couldn't, the last state would be worse than the first. Murder added tofelo de se! There's that to consider.' Now he returned to her in an active consciousness of herpresence. 'Suppose you loved a man who had one great—well, one great devil in him? Could you love a man with a devil in him?'
There was a touch of humour hardly won in his voice. Trix responded to it.
'With a thousand, if he was a man after all!'
'Ah, yes, I daresay. But with one—one immense fellow—a fellow who had sat on him and flattened him for years? Could you fight the fellow and beat him?'
Trix thought. 'I think I might have perhaps, before—before I got a devil too, you know.'
'Say he was a swindler—could you keep him straight? Say he was cruel—could you make him kind?' He paused an instant. 'Suppose he was a churl—could you open his heart?'
'All that would be very, very hard, even for a good woman,' said Trix Trevalla. 'And you know that in a case something like those I failed before.'
'Because, if you couldn't, it would be hell to you, and worse hell to him.'
'Yes,' murmured Trix. 'That would be it exactly.'
'But if you could——' He walked to the window and looked out. 'It would be something like pulling down the other side of the Inn and giving the sun fair play,' said he.
'But could the man do anything for her?' asked Trix. 'Something I said started you on this. The man I thought of would do nothing but make the bad worse. If she were mean first, he'd make her meaner; if she lied before, she'd have to lie more; and he'd—he'd break down the last of her woman's pride.'
'I don't mean a man like that.'
'No, and you're not thinking of a woman like me.'
'She'd have to take the place of the thing that had mastered him; he'd have to find more delight in her than in it; she'd have to take its place as the centre of his life.' He was thinking out his problem before her.
At last Trix was stirred to curiosity. Did any man argueanother's case like this? Was any man roused in this fashion by an abstract discussion? Or if he were dissuading her from the step she had hinted at, was not his method perversely roundabout? She looked at him with inquiring eyes. In answer he came across the room to her.
'Yet, if there were a man and a woman such as we've been speaking of, and there was half the shadow of a chance, oughtn't they to clutch at it? Oughtn't they to play the bold game? Ought they to give it up?'
His excitement was unmistakable now. Again he looked in her eyes as he had once before. She could do nothing but look up at him, expecting what he would say next. But he drew back from her, seeming to repent of what he had said, or to retreat from its natural meaning. He wandered back to the hearthrug, and fingered the statement of her position that lay on the mantelpiece. He was frowning and smiling too; he looked very puzzled, very kindly, almost amused.
'Wouldn't they be fools not to have a shot?' he asked presently. 'Only she ought to know the truth first, and he'd find it deuced hard to tell her.'
'She would have found it very hard to tell him.'
'But she would have?'
'Yes—if she loved him,' said Trix, smiling. 'Confession and humiliation comfort women when they're in love. When they're not——' She shuddered. Presumably Barslett came into her mind.
'If he never told her at all, would that be fair?'
'She couldn't forgive that, if she found it out.'
'No?'
'Well, it would be very difficult.'
'But if she never found it out?'
'That would be the grandest triumph of all for her, perhaps,' said Trix very softly. For now, vague, undefined, ignorant still, but yet sure at its mark, had come the idea that somehow, for some reason, Airey Newton spoke not of Beaufort Chance, nor of another, not of some abstractionor some hypothetical man, but of his very self. 'My prayer to him would be not to tell me, and that I might never know on earth. If I knew ever, anywhere, then I should know too what God had let me do.'
'But if he never told you, and some day you found out?'
Trix looked across at him—at his dreary smile and his knitted brow. She amended the judgment she had given a minute before: 'We could cry together, or laugh together, or something, couldn't we?' she asked.
He came near her again and seemed to take a survey of her from the feather in her hat to the toe of her polished boot.
'It's a confounded incongruous thing that you should be ruined,' he grumbled; his tone was a sheer grumble, and it made Trix smile again.
'A fool and her money——' she suggested as a time-honoured explanation. 'But ruin doesn't suit me, there's no doubt of that. Perhaps, after all, I was right to try to be rich, though I tried in such questionable ways.'
'You wouldn't be content to be poor?'
Trix was candid with him and with herself. 'Possibly—if everything else was very perfect.'
He pressed her hard. 'Could everything else seem perfect?'
She laughed uncomfortably. 'You understand wonderfully well, considering——!' A little wave of her arm indicated the room in Danes Inn.
'Yes, I understand,' he agreed gravely.
Again she rose. 'Well, I'm a little comforted,' she declared. 'You and Peggy and the rest of you always do me good. You always seemed the alternative in the background. You're the only thing now—or I'll try to make you. That doesn't sound overwhelmingly cordial, but it's well-meant, Mr. Newton.'
She held out her hand to him, but added as an afterthought, 'And you will tell me what to do about the investments, won't you?'
'And what will you do about the other man?'
Her answer was to give him both hands, saying, 'Help me!'
He looked long at her and at last answered, 'Yes, if you'll let me.'
'Thanks,' she murmured, pressing his hands and then letting them go with a sigh of relief. He smiled at her, but not very brightly; there was an effort about it. She understood that the subject was painful to him, because it suggested degradation for her; she had a hope that it was distasteful for another reason; to her these were explanations enough for the forced aspect of his smile.
He took up the paper again, and appeared to read it over.
'Not a bad list,' he said. 'You ought to be able to realise pretty well, as prices go now; they're not ruling high, you know.'
'What a lot you learn from your eyrie here!'
'All that comes in in business,' he assured her. 'No, they're not so bad, except the speculations, of course.'
'Except Glowing Stars! But, after all, most of them are Glowing Stars.'
He appeared to consider again; then he said slowly, and as though every word cost him a thought, 'I shouldn't altogether despair even of Glowing Stars. No, don't be in a hurry to despair of Glowing Stars.'
'What?' Incredulity cried out in her tone, mingled with the fancied hope of impossible good fortune. 'You can't conceivably mean that Mr. Fricker is wrong about them? Oh, if that were true!'
'Does it make all that difference?'
'Yes, yes, yes! Not the money only, but the sense of folly—of childish miserable silliness.' She was eager to show him how much that fancied distant hope could mean.
'I promise nothing—but Fricker deceived you before. He lied when he told you they were all right; he may be lying when he tells you they're all wrong.'
'But what good could that do him?'
'If you threw them on the market the price would fall. Suppose he wanted to buy!'
Luckily Trix did not wait to analyse the suggestion; she flew to the next difficulty.
'But the liability?'
'I'll look into it, and let you know. Don't cherish any hope.'
'No, but you must have meant that there was a glimmer of hope?' She insisted urgently, turning a strained, agitated face up to his.
'If you'll swear to think it no more than a glimmer—a glimmer let it be.'
'You always tell me the truth. I'll remember—a glimmer.'
'No more,' he insisted, with a marked pertinacity.
'No more, on my honour,' said Trix Trevalla.
She had gone towards the door; he followed till he was by the little table. He stood there and picked up the red book in his hand.
'No more than a glimmer,' he repeated, 'because things may go all wrong in the end still.'
'Not if they depend on you!' she cried, with a gaiety inspired by the hope which he did not altogether forbid, and by the trust that she had in him.
'Even though they depended altogether on me.' He flung the book down and came close to her. 'If they go right, I shall thank heaven for sending you here to-day. And now—I have a thing that I must do.'
'Yes, I've taken a terrible lot of your time. Good-bye.' She yielded to her impulse towards intimacy, towards knowing what he did, how he spent his time. 'Are you going to work? Are you going to try and invent things?'
'No, I'm going to study that book.' He pointed to it with a shrug.
'What's inside?'
'I don't know what I shall find inside,' he told her.
'Good news or bad? The old story or a new one? I can't tell.'
'You don't mean to tell me—that's clear anyhow,' laughed Trix. 'Impertinent questions politely evaded! I take the hint. Good-bye. And, Mr. Newton—a glimmer of hope!'
'Yes, a glimmer,' he said, passing his hand over his brow rather wearily.
'Well, I must leave you to the secrets of the red book,' she ended.
He came to the top of the stairs with her. Half-way down she turned and kissed her hand to him. Her step was a thousand times more buoyant; her smiles came as though native-born again and no longer timid strangers. Such was the work that a glimmer of hope could do.
To subtract instead of adding, to divide instead of multiplying, to lessen after increase, to draw out instead of paying in—these operations, whether with regard to a man's fame, or his power, or his substance, or even the scope of his tastes and the joy of his recreations, are precisely those which philosophy assumes to teach us to perform gracefully and with no exaggerated pangs. The man himself remains, says popular philosophy; and the pulpit sometimes seconds the remark, adding thereunto illustrative texts. Consolations conceived in this vein are probably useful, even though they may conceal a fallacy or succeed by some pious fraud on the truth. It is a narrow view of a man which excludes what he holds, what he has done and made. If he must lose his grasp on that, part of his true self goes with it. The better teachers inculcate not throwing away but exchange, renunciation here for the sake of acquisition there, a narrowing of borders on one side that there may be strength to conquer fairer fields on the other. Could Airey Newton, who had so often turned in impatience or deafness from the first gospel, perceive the truth of the second? He was left to fight for that—left between the red book and the memory of Trix Trevalla.
But Trix went home on feet lighter than had borne her for many a day. To her nature hope was ever fact, or even better—richer, wider, more brightly coloured. Airey had given her hope. She swung back the baize door of Peggy's flat with a cheerful vigour, and called aloud:—
'Peggy, where are you? I've something to tell you, Peggy.'
For once Peggy was there. 'I'm changing my frock,' she cried from her room in a voice that sounded needlessly prohibitory.
'I want to tell you something,' called Trix. 'I've been to Airey Newton's——'
Peggy's door flew open; she appeared gownless; her brush was in her hand, and her hair streamed down her back.
'Oh, your hair!' exclaimed Trix—as she always did when she saw it thus displayed.
Peggy's scared face showed no appreciation of the impulsive compliment.
'You've been to Airey's, and you've something to tell me?' she said, scanning Trix with unconcealed anxiety.
But Trix did not appear to be in an accusing mood; she had no charge of broken faith to launch, or of confidence betrayed.
'I told him how I stood—that I was pretty well ruined,' she explained, 'and he was so kind about it. And what do you think?' She paused for effect. Peggy had recourse to diplomacy; she flung her masses of hair to and fro, passing the brush over them in quick dexterous strokes as they went.
'Well?' she asked, with more indifference than was even polite, much less plausible.
But Trix noticed nothing; she was too full of the news.
'He told me there was a glimmer of hope for Glowing Stars!'
'He said that?'
Peggy's voice now did full justice to the importance of the tidings.
'Yes, hope for Glowing Stars. Peggy, if it should come out right!'
'If it should!' gasped Peggy. 'What did you say he said?'
'That there was hope for Glowing Stars—that I oughtn't to——'
'No, you told me another word; you said he used another word.'
'Oh, yes, he was very particular about it,' smiled Trix. 'And, of course, I mustn't exaggerate. He said there was a glimmer of hope.'
'Ah!' said Peggy. 'I'll come into the other room directly, dear.'
She went back to the looking-glass and proceeded with the task of brushing her hair. Her face underwent changes which that operation (however artistically performed and consistently successful in its effect) hardly warranted. She frowned, she smiled, she grew pensive, she became gloomy, she nodded, she shook her head. Once she shivered as though in apprehension. Once she danced a step, and then stopped herself with an emphatic and angry stamp.
'A glimmer of hope!' she murmured at last. 'And poor dear old Airey's left there in Danes Inn, fighting it out alone!' She joined her hands behind her head, burying them in the thickness of her hair. 'Oh, Airey dear, be good,' she whispered; 'do be good!'
She was so wrapped up in this invocation or entreaty that she quite lost sight of the fact that she herself was relieved of one part of her burden. Trix could not charge her with treachery now. But then it had never been Trix's accusation that she feared the most.
They did not know what they had been summoned for, and they were rather discontented.
'Just in the middle of a business man's business day!' ejaculated Arty Kane.
'Just as I'm generally sat down comfortably to lunch!' Miles Childwick grumbled.
'Just when I'm settling down to work after breakfast!' moaned Arty.
They were waiting in the sitting-room at Harriet Street. It was 2.15 in the afternoon. A hansom stood in the street; they had chartered it, according to orders received.
'What does she want us for?' asked Arty.
'A wanton display of dominion, in all likelihood,' suggested Miles gloomily.
'I'm not under her dominion,' objected Arty, who was for the moment devoted to a girl in the country.
'I've always maintained that you were no true poet,' said Miles disagreeably.
Peggy burst in on them—a Peggy raised, as it seemed, to some huge power of even the normal Peggy. She carried a lean little leather bag.
'Is the cab there?' she cried.
'All things in their order. We are here,' Miles reminded her with dignity.
'We've no time to lose,' Peggy announced. 'We've two places to go to, and we've got to be back here by a certain time—and I hope we shall bring somebody with us.'
'In the hansom?' asked Arty resignedly.
'In two hansoms—at least you know what I mean,' said Peggy.
'Isn't she a picture, Arty? Dear me, I beg your pardon, Miss Ryle. I didn't observe your presence. What happens to have painted you red to-day?'
'I'm in a terrible fright about—about something, all the same. Now come along. One of you is to get on one side of me and the other on the other; and you're to guard me. Do you see?'
'Orders, Arty!'
They ranged themselves as they were commanded, and escorted Peggy downstairs.
'Doesn't the hansom present a difficulty?' asked Arty.
'No. I sit in the middle, leaning back; you sit on each side, leaning forward.'
'Reversing the proper order of things, Miles——'
'In order to intercept the dagger of the assassin, Arty. And where to, General?'
'The London and County Bank, Trafalgar Square,' said Peggy, with an irrepressible gurgle.
'By the memory of my mother, I swear it was no forgery! 'Twas but an unaccustomed pen,' murmured Miles.
'I am equal to giving the order,' declared Arty proudly; he gave it with a flourish.
'How soon are we to have a look-in, Peggy?'
'Hush! She's killed another uncle!'
When the world smiled Peggy Ryle laughed aloud. It smiled to-day.
'See me as far as the door of the bank and wait outside,' she commanded, when she recovered articulate gravity.
Their external gloom deepened; they were enjoying themselves, immensely. Peggy's orders were precisely executed.
'Present it with a firm countenance,' Miles advised, as she left them at the entrance. 'Confidence, but no bravado!'
'It is no longer a capital offence,' said Arty encouragingly. 'You won't be hanged in silk knee-breeches, like Mr. Fauntleroy.'
Peggy marched into the bank. She opened the lean little bag, and took forth a slip of paper. This she handed to a remarkably tall and prim young man behind the counter. He spoilt his own effect by wearing spectacles, but accuracy is essential in a bank.
He looked at the amount on the cheque; then he looked at Peggy. The combined effect seemed staggering. He took off his spectacles, wiped them, and replaced them with an air of meaning to see clearly this time. He turned the cheque over. 'Margaret Ryle' met him in bold and decided characters. Tradition came to his rescue.
'How will you take it?' he asked.
Peggy burst out joyously: 'It's really all right, then?'
The prim clerk almost jumped. 'I—I presume so,' he stammered, and fled precipitately from the first counter to the third.
Peggy waited in some anxiety; old prepossessions were strong on her. After all, to write a cheque is one thing, to have it honoured depends on a variety of circumstances.
'Quite correct,' said the clerk, returning. He was puzzled; he hazarded a suggestion: 'Do you—er—wish to open——?'
'Notes, please,' said Peggy.
He opened a drawer with many compartments.
'Hundreds!' cried Peggy suddenly. She explained afterwards that she had wanted as much 'crackle' as the little bag would hold.
The clerk licked his forefinger. 'One—two—three—four——'
'Why should he ever stop?' thought Peggy, looking on with the sensation a millionaire might have if he could keep his freshness.
'Thank you very much,' she beamed, with a gratitude almost obtrusive, as she put the notes in the bag. She wasaware that it is not correct to look surprised when your friends' cheques are honoured, but she was not quite able to hold the feeling in repression.
Her bodyguard flung away half-consumed cigarettes and resigned themselves to their duties. A glance at the little bag showed that it had grown quite fat.
'Be very, very careful of me now,' ordered Peggy, as she stepped warily towards the hansom.
'There are seventy thousand thieves known to the police,' said Arty.
'Which gives one an idea of the mass of undiscovered crime in London,' added Miles. 'Now where to,mon Général?'
'346 Cadogan Square,' Peggy told them. 'Oh, how I wish I could have a cigarette!'
Both sympathetically offered to have one for her.
'The smoke will embarrass the assassin's aim,' Miles opined sagely.
Arty broke out in a sudden discovery.
'You're going to Fricker's!' he cried.
'I have an appointment with Mr. Fricker,' said Peggy, with pretended carelessness.
'At last, Arty, I shall see the mansions of the gilt.'
'No, you'll wait outside,' Peggy informed him, with a cruelty spoilt by bubbling mirth.
'Is that where we're to pick up the other passenger?' asked Arty.
'You talk as if everything was so very easy!' said Peggy rather indignantly.
'Being anywhere near a bank always has that effect on me,' he apologised.
'Now, one on each side—and be careful,' Peggy implored as the cab stopped in Cadogan Square. 'If anything happened now——!' Her tongue and her imagination failed.
'If you've got any money, you'll leave it there,' Miles prophesied, pointing at the Fricker door.
'Shall I?' cried Peggy in joyous defiance, as she sprang from the cab.
'Mayn't we even sit in the hall?' wailed Arty.
'Wait outside,' she commanded, with friendly curtness.
The door closed on her, the butler and footman showing her in with an air of satisfied expectancy.
'Who's to pay the cab?' exclaimed Arty, smitten with a sudden apprehension.
'Don't you remember being reviewed under the heading of "The Young Ravens"?' asked Miles, a little unkindly, but with a tranquil trust in the future.
That answer might not have satisfied the cabman. It closed the question for Arty Kane. They linked arms and walked up and down the square, discussing Shakespeare's habit of indulging in soliloquy. 'Which is bad art, but good business,' Miles pronounced. Of course Arty differed.
'The study, if you please, miss,' said the butler to Peggy Ryle. She followed him across the fawn-coloured mat which had once proved itself to possess such detective qualities.
Rooms change their aspects as much as faces; he who looks brings to each his own interpretation, and sees himself as much as that on which he gazes. The study was very different now to Peggy from what it had seemed on her previous entry. Very possibly Daniel experienced much the same variety of estimate touching the Lions' Den before he went in and after he came out.
Fricker appeared. He had lunched abstemiously, as was his wont, but daintily, as was Mrs. Fricker's business. He expected amusement; neither his heart nor his digestion was likely to be disturbed. An appeal for pity from Peggy Ryle's lips seemed to promise the maximum of enjoyment combined with the minimum of disturbance to business.
'So you've come back, Miss Ryle?' He gave her his lean, dry, strong hand.
'I told you I might,' she nodded, as she sat down in her old seat, opposite to his arm-chair.
'You've got the money?' His tone was one of easy pleasant mockery.
'It's no use trying to—to beat you down, I suppose?' asked Peggy, with an expression of exaggerated woe.
But he was too sharp for her. He did not fall into her artless trap. He was lighting his cigar, but he broke off the operation (it was not often that he had been known to do that), and leant across the table towards her.
'My God, child, have you got the money?' he asked her in a sort of excitement.
'Yes, yes, yes!' she broke out. Had not that fact been bottled up in her for hours? His question cut the wire. A metaphor derived from champagne is in no sort inappropriate.
'You've got it? Where have you got it from?'
'Your principle is not to ask that, Mr. Fricker.'
'He must be very fond of you.'
'You're utterly wrong—and rather vulgar,' said Peggy Ryle.
'On the table with it!' laughed Fricker.
She threw the little bag across the table. 'Oh, and have you a cigarette, Mr. Fricker?' she implored.
Fricker gave a short laugh, and pushed a silver box across to her. She leant back in an extraordinary perfection of pleasure.
'There are a lot of these notes,' he said. 'Are cheques out of fashion, Miss Ryle?'
'You're so suspicious,' she retorted. Apart from difficulties about a banking account, she would not have missed handling the notes for worlds.
He counted them carefully. 'Correct!' he pronounced.
'And here's your letter!' she cried, producing it from her pocket; the action was a veritablecoup de théâtre.
'Oh, I remember my letter,' he said with a smile—and a brow knit in vexation. Then he looked across the table at her. 'I'd have betted ten to one against it,' he remarked.
'You underrate the odds,' Peggy told him in a triumphthat really invited Nemesis. 'I'd have betted a thousand to one when I left your house.'
'You're a wonderful girl,' said Fricker. 'How the devil did you do it?'
She grew sober for a moment. 'I'm ashamed of how I did it.' Then she burst out again victoriously: 'But I'd do it again, Mr. Fricker!'
'You have all the elements of greatness,' said he, with a gravity that was affected and yet did not seem entirely pretence. 'You've got three thousand five hundred pounds out of somebody——'
'I've got four thousand,' interrupted Peggy.
'But five hundred was——'
'That's not there! That's kept for me. That's the most splendid part of it all!' In that indeed seemed to her to lie the finest proof of victory. The rest might have been shame; that her five hundred lay intact meant change of heart. She had not pressed her five hundred on Airey Newton. There are times when everything should be taken, as there are when all should be given; her instinct had told her that.
Fricker smiled again; his deft fingers parted the notes into two uneven heaps. The fingers seemed to work of their own accord and to have eyes of their own, for his eyes did not leave Peggy Ryle's face.
'Is the man in love with you?' He could not help returning to that explanation.
'Not a farthing, if he had been!' cried Peggy.
'Then he's an old man, or a fool.'
'Why can't I be angry with you?' she cried in an amused despair. 'Are—are greed and—nonsense the only things you know?'
'Are you finding new words for love?' he asked with a sneer.
Peggy laughed. 'That's really not bad,' she admitted candidly. Under the circumstances she did not grudge Fricker a verbal victory. The poor man was badly beaten; let him have his gibe!
He had made his two heaps of notes—a larger and a smaller; his hand wavered undecidedly over them.
'I can trust you to do what you said you would?' she asked suddenly.
'No less—and no more. That's an essential part of my policy,' he assured her.
'And Mrs. Trevalla is free of Glowing Stars? And you'll tell her what you promised?'
'I'll take them over, with the liability. Yes, and I'll tell her.'
He spoke rather absently; his mind seemed to be on something else. When he spoke again, there was an odd—perhaps an unprecedented—embarrassment in his manner.
'I see my way to doing something with Glowing Stars. Money must go into it—the calls must be paid—but I think some of the money might come out again.' He looked at Peggy; he saw her gloriously triumphant eyes, her cheeks flushed with the intoxication of achievement. The impulse was on him to exalt her more. 'I should have done very well if I'd bargained with you for three thousand.'
'It would have seemed almost as impossible. And you wouldn't! You wanted more than market value for your pound of flesh!'
He pushed the smaller of the two heaps that he had made across to her with a swift motion of his hand; the hand trembled a little, but his voice was hard and dry.
'Take back the extra thousand and call it square, Miss Ryle,' said he.
Peggy laid down her cigarette and stared at the heap of notes he pushed across to her.
'What?' she exclaimed in the despair of blank astonishment; she could not grasp the idea.
'Take those back. I shall do very well with these.'
He took up his cigar again, and this time he lit it. To Peggy the room seemed to go round.
'Why do you do that?' she demanded.
'On my word, I don't know. Your infernal pluck, I think,' he said in a puzzled tone.
'I won't have it. It was a bargain.'
'It's not your money, you may remember.'
Peggy had forgotten that.
'It might be a pleasant surprise to—to your friend,' he went on. 'And, if you'll let me do it, it will, Miss Ryle, be rather a pleasant change to me.'
'Why do you do it?' she asked again.
He made her an odd answer—very odd, to come from him. 'Because of the look in your eyes, my dear.'
His tone was free from all offence now; he spoke as a father might. If his words surprised her to wonder, he had no better understanding of hers.
'You too, you too!' she whispered, and the eyes which had moved him grew misty.
'Come, don't refuse me,' he said. 'Take it back to your friend. He'll find a use for it.'
He seemed to touch a spring in her, to give her a cue.
'Yes, yes!' she assented eagerly. 'Perhaps there would be a use for it. Do you give it me? Freely, freely?'
'Freely,' answered Fricker. 'And all you want shall be said to Mrs. Trevalla.'
Peggy opened her bag and began to put the notes in; but she looked still at Fricker.
'Did you ever think of anything like this?' she asked in a new burst of confidence.
'No, I didn't,' he answered, with a brusque laugh.
'You like doing it?'
'Well, was there any compulsion, Miss Ryle?'
'I shall take it,' she said, 'and I thank you very much.'
'I should have been distressed if you hadn't taken it,' said he.
Peggy knew that he spoke truth, strange as the truth might be. She had an impulse to laugh, an impulse to cry. Fricker's quiet face quelled both in her.
'And that finishes our business, I suppose?' he asked.
'It's understood that you don't worry Trix any more?'
'Henceforward Mrs. Trevalla ceases to exist for me.' He was really quite in the same tale with Mrs. Bonfill and society at large.
His declaration seemed to amuse Peggy. 'Oh, well, that's putting it rather strongly, perhaps,' she murmured.
'Not a bit!' retorted Fricker, with his confident contemptuousness.
'You can never tell how you may run up against people,' remarked Peggy with a mature sagacity.
He leant back, looking at her. 'I've learnt to think that your observations have a meaning, Miss Ryle.'
'Yes,' Peggy confessed. 'But I don't exactly know——' She frowned a moment, and then smiled with the brightness of a new idea. 'Where's your daughter, Mr. Fricker?'
'Connie's in her room.' He did not add that, by way of keeping vivid the memory of moral lessons, he had sent her there on Peggy's arrival.
'Do you think she'd give me a cup of tea?'
It was rather early for tea. 'Well, I daresay she would,' smiled Fricker. 'I shall hear what's up afterwards?'
'Yes, I'm sure you will,' promised Peggy.
He sent her under escort to the drawing-room, and directed that Connie should be told to join her. Then he returned to his study and began the letter which he had to write to Trix Trevalla. He fulfilled his obligation loyally, although he had no pity for Trix, and was sorely tempted to give her a dig or two. He resisted this temptation when he remembered that to do what he said he would was an essential part of his policy, and that, if he failed in it, Peggy Ryle would come again and want to know the meaning of it; at which thought he raised his brows and smiled in an amused puzzle. So he told Trix that Glowing Stars gave promise of a new development, and, though he could not offer her any price for her shares, he would take them off her hands for a nominalconsideration, and hold her free from the liability. 'Thus,' he ended, 'closing all accounts between us.'
'She was a fool, and my wife was a fool, and I suppose I was a fool too,' he mused. A broader view came to his comfort. 'A man's got to be a bit of a fool in some things if he wants to live comfortably at home,' he reflected. He could not expect the weaker sex (such undoubtedly would have been his description) to rise to the pure heights where he dwelt, where success in business was its own reward and the victorious play of brains triumph enough. 'But anyhow we backed the wrong horse in Trix Trevalla,' he had to acknowledge finally.
Before he had sealed the letter, Connie burst into the room. Fricker prepared to say something severe—these unlicensed intrusions were a sore offence. But the sight of his daughter stopped him. She was dressed in the height of smartness; she had her hat on and was buttoning her gloves; her cheeks were red, and excitement shone in her eyes. On the whole it looked as though she were clearing the decks for action.
'I'm going back to tea with Miss Ryle,' she announced.
He rose, and stood with his back to the fireplace.
'Well, she's a very nice friend for you to have, Connie.' There was a flavour of mockery in his tone.
'You know as well as I do that there's no question of that. But Mrs. Trevalla's living with her now.'
'I thought your mother and you had agreed to drop Mrs. Trevalla?'
Connie was not in the mood to notice or to trouble about his subtly malicious sarcasms.
'I asked Beaufort Chance to come here to-day,' she went on, 'and he told me he had to be in the City all the afternoon.'
'Aren't these things in your mother's department, Connie?'
'No, in yours. I want you to back me up. He's going to tea at four o'clock at Miss Ryle's—to meet Mrs. Trevalla.'
'Miss Ryle told you that? And she wants you to go with her?'
'Yes. You see what it means?'
'Why, Connie, you're looking quite dangerous.'
'I'm going with her,' Connie announced, finishing off the last glove-button viciously. 'At least I am if you'll back me up.'
'How?' he asked. He was amused at her in this mood, and rather admired her too.
'Well, first, you must see me through with mamma, if—if anything comes out about what's been happening. You know Beaufort wouldn't stick at giving me away if he wanted to get even with me.'
'You're probably right as to that,' agreed Fricker, licking his cigar.
'So you must tell mamma that it had your approval, and not let her be nasty to me. You can manage that, if you like, you know.'
'I daresay, I daresay. Is there any other diversion for your idle old father?'
'Yes. You must back me up with Beaufort. I believe he's dangling after Mrs. Trevalla again.' Connie's eyes flashed with threatenings of wrath.
'On the quiet?'
Connie nodded emphatically.
'Hardly the square thing,' said Fricker, smiling in an abused patience.
'Are you going to stand it? He's made fierce love to me.'
'Yes, I know something about that, Connie. And you're fond of him, eh?'
'Yes, I am,' she declared defiantly. 'And I won't let that woman take him away from me.'
'What makes you think she'd have him?'
'Oh, she'd have him! But I don't mean her to get the chance.'
Fricker liked spirit of all sorts; if he had approved ofPeggy's, he approved of his daughter's too. Moreover his great principle was at stake once more, and must be vindicated again; he must insist on fair play. If what Connie attributed to Beaufort Chance were true, it was by no means fair play. His mind briefly reviewed how he stood towards Beaufort; the answer was that Beaufort hung on him, and could not stand alone. He had the gift of seeing just how people were situated; he saw it better than they did themselves, thanks to his rapid intuition and comprehensive grasp of business affairs. He had set Beaufort Chance on horseback—financial horseback; if he willed, he could pull him down again; at the least he could make his seat most uncomfortable and precarious.
'We should be able to manage him between us, should we, after the event as well as before?'
'You help me to manage him before—I'll manage him myself afterwards,' said Connie.
'Good girl! Say what you like. I'll back you up. Bring him to me, if need be.'
Connie darted at him and kissed him. 'Don't say anything before Miss Ryle,' she whispered. 'It's just that I'm going out to tea.'
When they reached the hall, where Peggy was waiting in triumphant composure, Connie Fricker lived up to the spirit of this caution by discarding entirely her aggressive plainness of speech and her combative air. She minced with excessive gentility as she told Miss Ryle that she was ready to go with her; then she flew off to get a gold-headed parasol. Peggy sat and smiled at Mr. Fricker.
'She's going to have tea with you?' asked Fricker.
'Isn't it kind of her?' beamed Peggy.
Fricker respected diplomacy. 'The kindness is on your side,' he replied politely; but his smile told Peggy all the truth. She gave a laugh of amusement mingled with impatient anticipation.
Connie came running back. 'You'll tell mamma where I've gone, won't you?' she asked, her eyes reminding herfather of one-half of his duty. 'Oh, and possibly Mr. Chance will be here at dinner.' She managed to recall the other half.
Fricker nodded; Peggy rose with an admirable unconsciousness.
'Hold your bag tight, Miss Ryle,' Fricker advised, with a gleam in his eye as he shook hands.
'That's all right. I'm well looked after,' said Peggy, as the servant opened the door.
Two hansoms were waiting; in each sat a young man smoking a cigarette. At the sight of Peggy they leapt out; at the sight of the gorgeous young woman who accompanied Peggy they exchanged one swift glance and threw away the cigarettes. Introductions were made, Fricker standing and looking on, the butler peering over Fricker's shoulder.
'What time is it?' inquired Peggy.
'Quarter to four,' said Arty Kane.
'Oh, we must be quick, or—or tea'll be cold!' She turned to Miles Childwick. 'Will you go with Miss Fricker, Miles? Arty, take me. Come along. Good-bye, Mr. Fricker.'
She kissed her hand to Fricker and jumped in; Arty followed. Miles, with a queer look of fright on his face, lifted his hat and indicated the remaining hansom.
'It's rather unconventional, isn't it?' giggled Connie, gathering her skirts carefully away from the wheel.
'Allow me,' begged Miles in a sepulchrally grave tone.
He saw her in without damage, raised his hat again to Fricker, got in, and sat down well on the other side of the cab. He was of opinion that Peggy had let him in shamefully.
'I hope it's a quiet horse, or I shall scream,' said Connie.
'I hope it is,' agreed Miles most heartily. What his part would be if she screamed he dared not think; he said afterwards that the colours of her garments did quite enough screaming on their own account.
Fricker watched them drive off and then returned to hisstudy thoughtfully. But he was not engrossed in problems of finance, in the possibilities of Glowing Stars and of minimising the claims they would make. He was not even thinking of the odd way things had turned out in regard to Trix Trevalla, nor of how he had pledged himself to deal with Beaufort Chance. The only overt outcome of his meditations was the remark, addressed once again to his study walls:—
'I'm not sure that Connie isn't a bit too lively in her dress.'
The various influences which produced this illuminating doubt it would be tedious to consider. And the doubt had no practical result. He did not venture so much as to mention it to Connie or to Mrs. Fricker.