Claire Holland hesitated for a second at the door of the room. It had become almost a habit with her, this vague hesitation before she entered. She was not even aware that she did it. It was as though, subconsciously, her spirit knew of some atmosphere of evil that emanated from the room and that caused her to pause thus on its threshold. But she would have laughed had anyone attempted to define in this way her little instinctive hesitation.
She was a girl who loved life. She was frank and free and fearless and quite untouched, so far, by any of life’s mysteries, carrying within her one of the great mysteries of all, a girl’s untroubled heart. Love was a fairy tale to Claire; passion, an unbelievable obsession. Sorrow and pain and shame, things she had read of and heard about. Laughter and courage and gay wonder for the things she did not understand, these were the weapons with which Claire stood equipped to face the battle of life.
There were, of course, other possessions in her armoury, but she had not yet had cause to use them. Hope would come if she called, Faith was an anchor that would never fail her, Charity was a virtue that would grow with knowledge. They were there, slumbering behind the laughter in her heart.
She had a very attractive face, Claire, a slender, well-poised body; these things were to be assets for good or evil in the shaping of her life. She did not have that type of beauty at which men turn and stare, but hers was a face none the less that, once noticed, might well accompany them into their dreams. Brown eyes, round, shadowed like a child’s, small, straight nose; lips that betokened generosity; and a chin that, small as it was, yet showed strength. Love would most surely come to Claire.
But if you told Claire that she would have laughed. She did quite often laugh when people talked about love.
Anyway, now, after that moment’s hesitation, she gave a little toss back of her head and, pushing open the door, entered the room.
It was a pleasant enough room, soft-coloured, dainty, not over-furnished or ostentatious, but showing unmistakably that the owners thereof were wealthy. There was only one person in the room as Claire went in and she sat, or rather reclined, on the deep cushioned sofa, drawn up to the window. An open window, gay, because of the yellow, nodding daffodils that grew in the long, narrow box, running its length, helped in their gaiety by the golden sunshine of an April morning in London. London at its best and most wonderful, with a dim blue far-off sky and the scent of spring flowers in the air.
Claire loved that particular window with its box of golden daffodils. If one leant out of it, one could see up and down the river, and the river—that great, broad, placid stream that runs like a promise of Eternity through all the fret and hurry and restless energy of the vast City of London—held a never-ending fascination for Claire. She was not really a Londoner, she had, indeed, only lived there for a year, but already the fascination of London was about her heart.
Impossible to describe this spell that takes hold of people, but it is true of London to say that you either hate her or love her. Hate her for the cruelty, the vice, the blind, stumbling, groping agony that haunts her dark underworlds; that slinks past you in the tattered misery of the pavement poor; that flaunts before you in the places where men and women choose degradation for pleasure and mistake lust for love! An ugly side of London, this, and serene and calm through it all wanders her great river, rise her marvellous towers and palaces and domes—and lo! you love her—love her for the courage of her people that know laughter even in despair, for her lovers that dream dreams amidst her squalor, for the great heart of high adventure that beats behind all her life.
There is no doubt about it, if you love London, you love her with a passion of forgiveness, with an ache of longing that will never leave you, no matter how far afield you wander.
But all this is rather beyond the point. Claire’s love of London, for the moment, hardly went beyond a delicious anticipation of adventure. A year ago she had asserted a woman’s new-found right of independence, rather to the scandal of her vicarage home, and insisted upon coming to London to earn her own living. This was her first post, the people who owned this flat, her first employers. No wonder that London seemed imbued with all the possibilities so dear to the heart of youth.
Claire had come to the Tremaynes straight from her training school. A training school where amongst a good deal of laughter, sipping tea and rather frivolous chatter, Claire had imbibed the rudiments of shorthand and a fair capacity for appearing very strenuous with a typewriter. None of them took their work very seriously—does the world really expect the youth of girlhood to take work seriously?
Civilization forces them with relentless hands into the stern channels of the labour market, but they are like dreamers chained to their desks with their eyes following the flight of birds against blue skies and their hearts singing of life and love and laughter.
Strange material out of which to build civilization’s great framework of ordered work. But built it is, and in the process of its building too often youth and joy are crushed, and woman develops a marvellous capacity for becoming the worker bee of the hive.
The grimness of work had not as yet laid its hands on Claire. She had enjoyed every day of her life in London. Her letters home were full of bubbling cheerfulness. She saw life in London through rose-coloured spectacles and loved it. She was prepared to extend the frank, good comradeship of her heart to everyone. The Tremaynes were by no means left out. Claire liked the Tremaynes immensely. They were so nice to her, they were nice to look at, nice to work for, and they were unendingly interesting.
“There is something,” Claire once confided in a burst of confidence to one of the girls who worked with her at the training school, “mysterious about Mrs. Tremayne. Her eyes are the saddest things I’ve ever seen—yet her lips are always ready to laugh.”
“Yes, but what about him?” Miss Greatly, the girl in question, had asked. She was a young lady who invariably alluded to men with the sound of capital letters in her voice.
“Oh, he’s a dear,” Claire had laughed in answer.
She liked both of them. But it was with Mrs. Tremayne she came most in contact, it was for Mrs. Tremayne she worked. Madelaine Tremayne, with her dark, tragic eyes, her lips, that, as Claire said, were always ready for laughter, was a writer of stories. There was, financially, no need for her to write them—the Tremaynes were already very well off—but it was the way in which she—who was, after all, very much cut off from life—amused herself. For Mrs. Tremayne was an invalid, tied to her couch, moving with difficulty from it down to the sumptuous motor-car that would take her twice a day out for drives. She had been, it seemed, very much of an invalid ever since their only child had been born, about three years before Claire met them. Mrs. Tremayne, though ordinarily a very silent person about her own concerns, had told Claire a little of all she had lived through at the time; of how the baby had died, and she herself had been near to death’s door; and, in a spasm of pity, Claire had felt that that story, very briefly told, did much to explain the tragedy that lay hidden behind Mrs. Tremayne’s dark eyes.
Mrs. Tremayne must have been very beautiful as a girl; through all her invalidism she still retained traces of this beauty. She was tall, with a rather long, perfectly modelled face and black hair.
Claire, from her standpoint of twenty-three, regarded Mrs. Tremayne at thirty-nine, as quite old, yet, for some strange reason, she never attached this adjective to Mr. Tremayne. Two years older than his wife, Mr. Tremayne gave one the impression of boundless youth and vitality. He was a striking-looking man, tall, well-built, with powerful shoulders and hands and a face that was bound to attract attention from women. It had about it a strangely eager look; the eyes were hungry, the mouth relentless. Here was a man—oh, quite instinctively women judge this from a man’s face—who was capable of thinking the world well lost for love—who would be cruel and fierce and infinitely and amazingly tender. A man born to be a lover, with some flame awake in his heart at which it would not be safe to warm one’s fingers!
Naturally, Claire did not think all that about him. She liked him—and his eyes with their quick eagerness, their intent scrutiny, intrigued her. She had a sense of fluttering pleasure when he was in the room, behind which lurked a ridiculous little touch of fear. But she liked him and was in some odd way sorry for him, just as she liked Mrs. Tremayne and was most certainly sorry for her.
“Are you going to work this morning?” she asked now, pausing at the back of the sofa.
Mrs. Tremayne looked up at her. The dark eyes studied the girl’s light poise, the clear white of her neck and throat, where it merged into the grey of the jumper Claire wore. The softness of the young face with its generous mouth, its wide, clear eyes, was very charming. And, watching, a little flicker of pain swept across Mrs. Tremayne’s mind. Every year the daffodils come back to the world, but youth—once gone—never returns to the heart of a woman. “I don’t know,” she answered slowly; “it seems rather a shame to keep you in on so glorious a day.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense,” said Claire. “I’ve had my walk.” She laughed a little. “Early this morning before you and Mr. Tremayne were up. You were late last night, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Madelaine nodded. “We sat up talking till all hours. What did you do?”
“I went to the theatre,” said Claire. “I and another girl.” She came round to the front of the sofa and sat down at the table at which she always wrote while Mrs. Tremayne dictated. “Rather a dull play, I thought. All about love gone wrong.”
“Love gone wrong!” repeated Mrs. Tremayne. And her lips smiled as Claire always insisted they did, without in any way altering the tragedy of her eyes. “What a ridiculous way you have of describing things, Claire.”
“Oh, well, you know what I mean,” said Claire. “People do make such a tremendous fuss about love, don’t they?”
“It is a vast and mysterious force,” said Mrs. Tremayne slowly. “A tremendous power for good or evil.”
“I don’t know about its being mysterious,” Claire answered flippantly. “I mean,” she laughed, though a little colour crept into her face, “we all know what’s at the bottom of it. It’s only that we hate to be frank about things, don’t we?
“If I fall in love—which heaven forbid, because it sounds an extraordinarily silly state to be in—I am going to be quite honest about it.”
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Tremayne, “I think it is a good thing to be honest. It’s extraordinary,” she touched listlessly with her hand the paper that lay on the floor at her side, “how closely tragedy sometimes stalks in love’s train.”
“You mean,” said Claire philosophically, “when people kill each other for love, or when the wronged husband—silly word, isn’t it?—sees red and shoots lover and wife. That’s just what I mean—if people were sensible and frank, those sort of tragedies never would happen.”
“You think you will eliminate jealousy by frankness?” asked Mrs. Tremayne. She laughed suddenly. “Oh, my dear, how very young you are. Be as frank about it as you like, love remains one of the most primitive things in the world. As primitive as hate and murder and death!”
“Well, I never do understand why people murder each other over love,” Claire acknowledged. “I suppose it’s what Galsworthy calls ‘the possessive instinct’! If I had a husband and he fell in love with someone else, I shouldn’t feel entitled to make a fuss about it. I certainly should not feel entitled to murder him or the lady.
“Yes, I suppose we learn self-control for some definite purpose,” smiled Mrs. Tremayne. “If you are angry, you don’t necessarily hit the person that annoys you. You cannot cage love, but you can, you must, control the instincts that drive him.”
Claire gave up the argument with just a little shrug of her shoulders. “I suppose,” she admitted, “that my theories do sound a little far-fetched. But I’m sure if love were given more freedom, it wouldn’t be—well, so promiscuous as we think. And, anyway, surely it’s better for a man to leave his wife politely and live with another woman than to have to murder her before he goes.”
“I see you’ve been reading the paper,” said Mrs. Tremayne. Her eyes darkened, her mouth quivered. “Poor woman! Perhaps she clung to him too fiercely to let go. White frail arms that he had once loved, clinging round his neck—hindering his freedom.” She sat up abruptly. “Oh, don’t let’s talk of it,” she said, “on such a day as this, with daffodils awake in the world.” She crumpled the paper up with fierce, trembling hands. “It is such a hideously ugly story, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she agreed, “as it ended, it was ugly. Would you like me to read over the last bit of yesterday’s dictation, Mrs. Tremayne?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Tremayne. The paper dropped from her fingers, the mask settled back on her face. “Where had we got to, Claire?”
She sank back on her cushions, listening to Claire’s voice, watching the pose of Claire’s young head against the half-open window, the background of nodding daffodils.
How pretty the girl was, she thought vaguely—how oddly boyish the shape of the young head, moulded by the wave of soft, brown, gold-tinted hair! Young! Untroubled! Untouched! Her own eyes darkened, little lines of pain showed on her face. Life could be so bitterly cruel, so absolutely hideous, and life would take this fresh young thing and make of it—what?
That is a word that might be engraved very deep on all our tombstones, and only the Judge who waits Beyond can give any real answer to the question.
Claire did not live with the Tremaynes. That would not have fitted in with her ideas of freedom, though Mrs. Holland, poor mother, away in the vicarage home, worrying and fretting her heart out about Claire’s venture into life, would have felt far happier had Claire been safely deposited in what she could have called a nice household. Not so Claire. “No living-in jobs for us!” That had been the pride of the school where she had trained. “Let’s have our evenings free at least!” Free they were, therefore. As free as the proverbial London sparrow and certainly as irresponsible.
Claire, a little more fortunate than her fellows in that she obtained a well-paid, lightly worked post from the start, launched out fearlessly into a little flat, which she occupied alone—with a delicious sense of adventure, except sometimes in the middle of the night, when she woke up and knew ridiculous fear.
It was a pleasant little white-painted abode at the top of a somewhat narrow, grim-looking house off Earls Court Square. The whole building was devoted to these little miniature flats, two front doors to every landing. Inside the front door, her own domain consisted of a tiny sitting-room, bedroom and slip-kitchen. The bathroom, to which she owned a key, she shared with the inhabitants of three of the other flats, the hot water for the bath being provided by the caretaker who lived in the basement.
Claire thought her flat really delightful. It was like a toy to her. She furnished it piecemeal, providing at first only the necessities, and advancing from them to luxuries and purely decorative effects. When the Tremaynes came to hear of it they were lavish in their presents. Their gifts made the place really luxurious, inside its little narrow white limits. Mr. Tremayne had even insisted upon providing her with a telephone. His wife’s secretary, he said chaffingly, must be within call. It stood on the little round table by her bed and was a source of great joy to Claire, for should there be grim occasions upon which her much-prized freedom haunted her with a sense of loneliness, that almost amounted to despair, she would ring up the night operator and ask the time.
Claire managed her own cooking, such as it was; a charlady did her flat for her in the mornings, after Claire had started out to work.
On the evening of the day on which Mrs. Tremayne had shown such surprising emotion over what had, to Claire, amounted to a frivolous discussion, Claire, coming back to her little flat, let herself in with her latchkey and shut the door behind her with a more definite sense than usual of being glad she was her own mistress for the next fifteen hours. Today, somehow, even Mrs. Tremayne’s dictating had proved irksome, and the three hours’ typing which generally took up her afternoon, almost unbearably dull. There was some restless stir awake in the world. Mrs. Tremayne had been right—it was a shame to stay indoors in such glorious weather. Town lover as she was, as she had indeed become in her one year’s residence, today Claire’s heart had been mocked by memories of the country. Some cool, green, leafy lane, banks on which primroses grew, mossy edges to little flickering streams, the smell of soft moist earth, of grass and trees and flowers! She knew just what the garden at home would look like today. The windows of the drawing-room would be open on to the untidy lawn, and, away at the back of the lawn, there would be a profusion of bulb flowers like dancing stars in the grass. And how good everything would smell! “I’m almost home-sick,” said Claire to herself, and smiled at the thought. What should she do with herself? It was still early. Go for a walk in the park; a ride on the top of a bus through the busy chattering streets; see if she could find Elsie Greatly and drag her into the companionship of some adventure. A dinner, perhaps in Soho—the gallery of a theatre. Elsie was an amusing little specimen, all emotion and enthusiasm. Perilously eager to be in love, looking for it everywhere, tugging at Claire’s attention to make her notice it. In all probability Elsie had by this time found some man to go out with; it was almost a month since Claire had seen her.
“And if she’s in love,” decided Claire, “I couldn’t bear her. She’s sure to be dreadfully sloppy.”
She took off her little all-concealing cloche hat and threw it on to a chair, ruffling her hair up in front of the glass, idly thinking of the things she might do with this glorious freedom of hers, deciding finally to do nothing.
“I’ll read,” thought Claire, “that new book of Masefield’s and eat that cold tongue for supper, and not go out at all. I feel just horribly lazy.”
Read she did, therefore, tucked up on the sofa which had been a present from Mrs. Tremayne, her slim young legs, in the thinnest of grey silk stockings, curled up under her, her brown-gold head buried in a cushion that Mrs. Holland had made and sent to her from home. It was a comfy cushion, and it was faintly reminiscent of lavender, a scent Claire associated in some way with her mother and the big old linen cupboard at home.
She chose, strangely enough, after her discussion of the morning, The Widow of Bye Street to read. A story of love and passion and murder and hate. It stirred her oddly. How awfully stupid, how seemingly hopeless men and women were before that strange mysterious wind of passion that blew their lives like little helpless crafts about the sea of life. Love! She laid the book down, the last lines chanting in her mind, and sat there thinking, dreaming, wondering. The sharp tinkle of the telephone bell disturbed her reverie. She jumped up quickly, and the book slid to the floor. Why, it must be quite late, the room was almost dark with shadows. Who could be ringing her up?
“Wrong number, probably,” reflected Claire, as she moved lazily into the bedroom to answer it.
The voice across the wires woke a little flush on her cheeks. It was curious, but contact of any sort with Mr. Tremayne always brought this sense of excitement into her being.
“Hello, Miss Holland. I’m lucky to find you in, aren’t I? Look here, I’ve got two seats for the Palace tonight and Madelaine doesn’t feel like coming. She suggests I ask you, if you’d care to.”
“Oh, I’d love to,” said Claire, hurried forward on the little flutter of excitement. “That is, I mean, won’t it bore you?”
“The show?” he asked. “I believe it’s pretty good.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Claire explained, “I meant having me instead of Mrs. Tremayne.”
She heard his laughter, a little warm-throated sound. “Don’t be so modest,” he mocked. “Madelaine says, ‘Ask her if she can put up with an old fogey like you.’”
“Oh!” said Claire.
“Can you?” his gay voice queried. “That’s good. Then I’ll be round in about half an hour.”
“I’ll be ready,” said Claire, and hung up the receiver with a strange sense of having come more in contact with the electricity of the wire than usual.
She ate her preordained supper of cold tongue and bread and butter hastily in order to have more time to dress in. She wanted to look really nice, and, youthfully, she had very little idea of how to achieve it. Her hair was just there. You cannot do bobbed hair, not stick a flower into it to add a little enchantment. There is a certain boyish defiance about bobbed hair that defeats all those little careful aids to beauty that girls with long hair can use. Claire’s dress, too, she felt, would fall rather below Mr. Tremayne’s standard. Mrs. Tremayne dressed so wonderfully, had such beautiful, shimmering, wonderfully draped frocks. Claire’s was rather a dowdy little affair of black crêpe de Chine. She looked—but this in her mood of dissatisfaction she did not realize—very attractive in it. She was trying the effect of a string of long, jade beads, her only valuable possession, against the whiteness of her neck and throat, when the bell of her tiny front door rang; and, realizing that whatever else she did she must not keep Mr. Tremayne waiting, Claire slid the beads back in the drawer and, picking up her coat, hurried to the door and opened it.
Mr. Tremayne himself stood there looking down at her, smiling a little, his eyes very intent, extraordinarily keen.
“Ready?” he asked. “I see you are. But we are—or shall be—very early if we dash off now. Won’t you ask me in for five or ten minutes?”
“Why, of course,” said Claire. She stood aside to let him pass—in the passage there was not room for two of them to stand abreast. “That’s the sitting-room, straight in front. The switch for the light is at the left of the door. You’ve never been here before, have you?”
“No,” Tremayne admitted. He moved forward, his hand touching the electric-light switch woke the room to a soft dazzle of brilliance.
He stood looking round him. “You’ve got everything very nice,” he said; he went forward and stood by the diminutive mantelpiece, staring down at a little plaster figure of a seated angel with wide, folded wings. “I like this,” he said. “Where did you pick it up?”
“It’s my guardian angel,” laughed Claire. She followed him into the room and shook the cushions of the sofa into a semblance of decorum. “I am afraid the whole place is very untidy. I was being thoroughly lazy when you rang up.”
The man had turned to watch her; there was a smile about his lips, his eyes were very gentle. “Your guardian angel!” he said softly. “I thought the modern young lady had dispensed with any form of guardianship.”
“One can’t dispense with angels,” Claire challenged him. “At least, not if one believes in them.” She sat down on the arm of the sofa. She knew it was ridiculous, it was almost, she told herself hotly, primitive, but she did feel embarrassed at this man’s personality in her little shut-away domain.
“And you,” he asked, “believe in them?”
“I don’t know,” she acknowledged, “my beliefs are awfully muddled up, Mr. Tremayne.”
“I think that could be said of most of us,” he answered, and came and sat down on the sofa, picking up Masefield from the floor. “Poetry?” he said with a smile, “and Masefield at that. Well, he calls ‘a spade a spade’, doesn’t he?”
The book opened and he leant forward and read aloud the first lines that caught his attention:
So this was love, the something he had missed,
Woman and man athirst, aflame, alone——
Definitely embarrassed now, aware that her cheeks were suddenly flushed with hot colour, Claire slid to her feet.
“Isn’t it time we were going?” she asked, “and I’ve forgotten a hankie. I must just get one.”
She fled from the room and Tremayne rose slowly, putting the book aside. Perhaps it amused him, this vaunted freedom of girlhood, that hauled down its flag so hastily at the first sign of danger; perhaps he knew just what she so instinctively feared. He said at least nothing, helping her on with her coat, when she came back, with courteous fingers and grave eyes.
“We shall still be in plenty of time,” he said. “But I’ll tell James to drive slowly. It’s a glorious evening.”
Claire had never been out alone with him before, though she had often enough accompanied him and Mrs. Tremayne to the theatre, or driven down with them into the country, on afternoon excursions. It certainly was, as he had said, a glorious evening. The sky a beautiful dim, dark blue, with the moon a thin sickle of light, showing over the trees of the park, accompanied by one shining star. Claire lost her sense of uneasiness, settled more firmly into her spirit of enjoyment, chattered freely, told him little personal things that in cold blood she would never have dreamt of relating to the interesting and intriguing Mr. Tremayne. She found him a delightful companion, with thoughts that matched hers, with laughter ready to follow where she led, with just sufficient admiration and friendliness in his eyes to make her feel thoroughly content with herself and her clothes, secure in the fact that if he thought her pleasant to look at, well, so would everyone else.
It was a delicious evening and she enjoyed every moment of it, even the last rather breathless event, when he held her hand to say good night, and she was just for that brief second aware of a rather dangerous emotion that knocked at her heart.
“I’ve loved it,” she said. “Good night!”
“And I, too,” he answered. “Some day we must do it again.”
Tremayne went home with his own thoughts; whatever they were he did not disclose them to anyone. Madelaine was awake, lying propped up on her pillows, her black hair like a cloud framing her sombre eyes.
“You’re late, aren’t you?” she asked. “Did you drive Claire straight home?”
He stood looking at her, his strong lips twisted to rather grim humour.
“Yes,” he answered, “said good night to her on the doorstep as James can tell you.”
She neither noticed nor resented his sarcasm, if sarcasm it was.
“Do you remember,” she asked, “that Mrs Mowbray we once met in Italy?”
“I do,” he said carelessly; his eyes shifted, moved round the room. Of late, when talking to Madelaine, he had the strange sensation of being shut up in a cage with her. “Pretty woman, wasn’t she?”
Under the sheets Madelaine’s hands closed in a sudden futile spasm of rage. She was a woman tortured by despair. Torturing herself, as indeed is most often the way with the victim of love’s close companion, jealousy. In the grip of it she was powerless to see sense or act reasonably.
“Most women are beautiful to you,” she affirmed harshly, and her voice held a note of pain in it.
He shrugged his shoulders and moved across to the window, lifting the curtain a little to look out. The river showed a broad, flat band of blackness between its strings of guardian lights.
“Isn’t that rather a compliment to your sex?” he asked, and dropped the curtain to turn and look at her. “I find that little secretary girl of yours distinctly pleasant to look at.”
He came back to her across the room and stood looking down at her, his eyes grave, his mouth steady. “Madelaine, why do you torture yourself so needlessly?” he asked. “This jealousy of yours is so insane, so useless.”
“I am afraid,” she answered, with hot, dry lips. “Afraid of the day when you meet the other woman whom you will really love.”
“Well, the day hasn’t come yet,” he said lightly. “Why meet the trouble half-way?”
He was near enough for her to touch; she put out frenzied hands and caught at him, dragging his face down to a level with hers.
“From the day I married you,” she whispered, “I’ve been faithful with heart and mind and body. You can’t say the same, Denis, can you?”
Being so near to her he kissed her. But there was something cool and indifferent in the caress, and he freed himself quickly. “I’ve never been able to understand a woman’s definition of the word ‘faithful’,” he parried. “Good night, Madelaine, it’s time we were both asleep.”
Fire is perhaps the most dangerous element that we have harnessed to our needs. So warm, so comforting, so friendly its very presence in our lives, so fierce, so terrible and swift in its cunning to destroy once started on destruction. Light a small fire by design or accident, let the wind blow from the right quarter and in an amazingly short space of time that little flicker of light has become a roaring, raging flame that you are powerless to subdue. “Many waters cannot quench love.” The old words ring down the ages and on every page of history they are written and re-proved. Yet how lightly, how indifferently, the majority of us come to the lighting of our individual fires.
Claire lived through two, three months of delightful excitement, of perilous pleasures and a strange ignoring of facts. She knew herself as happy and excited, prone, too, to moods of intense, rather pleasant depression. She lost, quite instinctively, a little of the sympathy she had originally felt for Mrs. Tremayne. She could notice as she grew to know her better that Madelaine was a creature of irresponsible moods. Her attitude to most things, despite her ready-made stiff laughter, was one of suspicious gloom. Hers was a character that fitted least of all into the atmosphere of spring, everywhere else at this time so prevalent.
The harshness that had crept into Madeline’s attitude towards her husband seemed to Claire unforgivable. He showed, in contrast, so never failingly courteous and good-natured. The three of them were often together, for, as his friendship with Claire grew, Denis Tremayne took to frequenting more and more his wife’s company.
As it was she danced gaily enough through the days, her charm ripening to almost perfect beauty because of the unsuspected joy that ran through her being. In the mornings she would take down at Madelaine’s dictation, at lunch he would be there, and in the afternoons she typed in her own little room, with its high-up window that opened on to the river. Sometimes Mr. Tremayne would look in to see how she was getting on. Madelaine always lay down in the afternoon. But he would not stay there a minute or two, he at least was not ignorant of the danger, the sordidness that masked and spoiled the very real homage of his heart before this girl whom he had come to love. More often he would meet her outside on her way home—and he would stop and turn back and go a little of the way with her, and tempt her perhaps out of her direct route home into one of the parks. More rarely still, he would go all the way home with her and up into her little domain and sit down, and it was on those very rare occasions that Claire would see him with her gaiety laid aside, and she would glimpse—with a sudden wave of pity something that was essentially hurt and lonely and sad in this man’s life.
“When you start thinking about a man being lonely and sad, you’ve got to watch out,” remarked Elsie flippantly, on the day when Claire first mentioned this interesting fact to her: “A girl starts bringing sunshine into a married man’s life and there’s always the devil to pay.”
“Elsie,” remonstrated Claire. She was rather dangerously poised on the narrow window-ledge of the open window of her little flat, while Elsie, perched on the bed, assiduously polished her perfect nails. “You’ve got a horrid, materialistic mind. Can’t a man and a girl be friends without you and everyone else thinking the worst.”
“What is the worst?” asked Elsie. She swept rather impudent eyes over Claire’s lightly-poised body. “Anyway, what’s Mrs. Tremayne got to say to all this?”
“Nothing,” Claire asserted hotly. “What should she have to say? She doesn’t really,” she added, on reflection, “take much interest in him. I think that is what makes him seem lonely.”
The two girls had tea together in Claire’s tiny sitting-room and Claire washed up alone afterwards. Elsie, with ten minutes spent in front of the glass powdering her face, delicately rouging clear-cut lips, and putting just the right touch of darkness to swept-back lashes, was off to meet her man. What a ridiculous creature she was, Claire thought. She lived, it seemed, for these brief romances, her face the most treasured possession she had, since it was like a lighted candle round which the men moths fluttered.
“But of love,” said Claire to herself, attaching to the word goodness only knows what depths of unguessed feeling. “She really knows nothing at all. I wonder”—she paused in her task of putting away the tea things to study her own face in the glass—“if I shall ever fall in love—what does it really feel like to be kissed?”
Monumental wonderments that have beset the heart of girlhood since the days of Eve and her apple.
The ring of the doorbell upset her cogitations. She had an uncomfortable feeling, after Elsie’s remarks of earlier in the day, that the fluttered interest which the sound brought her must be sinful. But, sinful or not, they surged up in a wave of warm joy when she opened the door and found Denis Tremayne standing there.
“Do you know,” he said, “I had a feeling I should find you in and alone this evening. And, by Jove, I am glad I have.”
“Come in,” laughed Claire. “I am alone. I’ve just finished washing up the tea things.”
He sat down on the sofa, pulled up close to the open window. Claire could see his face now, it looked hard, curiously white with a strained look about the eyes and mouth.
“To tell you the truth,” he added, and his eyes held hers in one of their rather disconcerting stares, “we’ve had, well it’s a foolish thing to say, but I think it might be styled a row.”
“Oh—I’m so sorry,” said Claire softly. She sensed the need for sympathy behind the hardness in his voice. She sat down on the low stool by the fireplace and clasped her hands round her knees. “Isn’t it horrid having a row with someone you’re fond of!”
“Madelaine is difficult,” he said shortly. “Temperamental—you may have noticed it. She is insanely jealous of me.”
“Of you?” said Claire; she watched him with wide eyes. Some lightly-dropped remark of Elsie’s was stirring in her mind.
“You mean——” she hesitated.
His blue eyes swept all over her, and came back to rest again on her brown ones.
“I’ve got to be frank,” he said bitterly, “because Madelaine has made up her mind to have what she calls a talk to you.”
Warm from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, Claire jumped up standing to face him, hands clasped behind her back. How much like an eager defiant boy she seemed at that moment with her slim, erect figure, her thrown-back head of short, wavy hair.
“You can’t mean,” she gasped, “that Mrs. Tremayne thinks that you—that I——”
“My dear, she knows,” Tremayne answered softly.
“Knows! Knows what?” asked Claire.
“That I love you,” he answered, and sat not looking at her, his face a little turned away.
Claire stood staring at him. Strange how the boyishness dropped out of her pose as she looked. The woman in her stirred and drew tremulous breath. His stern face turned away, the lines of his strong, close-held mouth, the grey in his dark, straight hair, woke pity in her as she had never known pity before.
She was stirred by impulses for which she could in no way account. She wanted to draw close to him, and put her hands about him, and touch her cheek against that sleek, dark, grey-flecked head. There was something unnerving about the silence of her little white and green room, his tense-held, motionless figure. She must do something to break it.
“You can’t love me,” she said quickly, almost breathlessly. “Don’t you see you can’t? It’s wrong.”
He made a curious little movement with his hands, as if he pushed something away.
“I wanted to warn you,” he said, “that is why I came round tonight. Madelaine has told me she intends to speak to you. All of this is not your fault, but she is not prepared to see that.”
“But I,” said Claire. “I——” She turned round away from him and, with her hands on the mantelpiece, bowed her face and rested it between them. “I don’t know what to say—what to do,” she whispered.
There was something of childishness in the wail. Tremayne looked up at her quickly.
“The thing is what do you want me to do?” he said. “Do you hate me for loving you?”
He got up abruptly and moved over to her side. “You’ve been very blind, Claire,” he said; his voice lingered on the word in some subtle caress. “My dear—couldn’t you see I loved you?”
Love! Love! Love! The word danced through Claire’s brain—the man’s voice stirred across her senses. Her breath fluttered as though afraid at the doorway of her heart. And then suddenly—he bent and kissed her, his hands went round her, he had gathered her to him.
He had caught a girl in his arms, it was a woman who had struggled to get free.
“What did you come for?” asked Claire.
“I think to say good-bye,” he answered. “And I swear, too, that I meant it to be a good-bye which would leave no agony in your mind.”
“And if I had loved you?” said Claire—still she stood facing him, her eyes on his.
He turned away and strode to the sofa and sat down, and stared out of the window. And, because he had spoken the truth, Claire’s heart twisted to sudden intolerable pain on his behalf. All else was forgotten—the desire to comfort him was all she knew. She ran and knelt beside him, eager, soft hands on his.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t! Love isn’t any of those things. Oh, I don’t know much about love, but because you love me I am not ashamed or degraded.
“We’ve got to be sensible,” she said. “I should never be really happy being bad. It’s a kind of conscience, I suppose, inherited from some Puritan ancestor. And you—if you love me—are going to help me to be good.”
“If Madelaine asks you to give me up—never to see me again—to shut me outside even friendship, are you going to agree?” he asked.
“Will she ask me to do that?” Claire whispered.
“She’s not likely to be satisfied with less,” he answered.
Being in love with a married man was a state of affairs that would not be defined as romantic in the vicarage home to which Claire fled for a week-end. In that retreat she did not mention the impasse which had arisen between herself and Mr. Tremayne, though she spoke freely enough of the Tremaynes and her work for Mrs. Tremayne. She had lived through a week of intense excitement, mind and spirit and heart on tiptoe for the next adventure, since Tremayne’s visit to her flat, but as a matter of fact, nothing very much had happened. Outwardly at least Mrs. Tremayne had said nothing. Mr. Tremayne had been away. Outwardly things had seemed placid, orderly, as usual; inwardly, Claire’s mind had been a seething ferment of contradiction. “I can’t help loving him—he can’t help loving me. How can it be a sin?” And still Mrs. Tremayne said nothing, that was the amazing thing. Mr. Tremayne stayed away.
He came back on Friday, just as Claire was leaving. Looked into the little room where she did her typing as she was tidying away her day’s work.
“Well?” he said, and stood just within the room, the door half-shut behind him, looking at her.
How she loved him—that was the thought that welled up in Claire’s mind; and only a week ago, looking at herself in the glass, she had wondered would she ever be in love, she had thought what it would feel like to be kissed. She knew what it felt like now—ecstatic—wonderful, if only conscience wasn’t there like a spoilt fretful child in the background.
“Nothing,” she said, “nothing has happened.” That was what his question meant she knew. “Mrs. Tremayne has given me a long week-end. I am going home.”
His lowered eyes stared at her hands where they showed tight clenched on the back of a chair, his mouth twitched.
“You’ve made up your mind,” he said softly. “It’s the end.”
“No,” Claire said quickly. “No. Only I must have time to think. Down there with my people I shall think more normally. You must understand that.”
“I do understand,” he acknowledged gravely.
“Good-bye, my dear,” he whispered, and went out, closing the door behind him.
Afterwards, when the week-end was half-way through, she realized that he must indeed have known how definite that good-bye was. He knew so much more of life than she did—he must have realized from the beginning how hopeless their love was; he must have known that thinking normally would bring her to just that knowledge. That had been written in his eyes in that brief moment as he stood facing her, and he had been too chivalrous to plead his suit any further.
Gladys, her young sister, met her at the station. Gladys was just home for the holidays—a tall, overgrown girl of fourteen with a long pigtail that slapped her back as she walked. A dreamy, infantile creature, Gladys—you could not get much sense out of her. She lived in a world of dreams. They had walked through the little village in silence and come to the Vicarage gate and turned into the dear old untidy garden. The Reverend Otto Holland had been digging in his garden; he straightened himself to wave a friendly spade at Claire. In a way, the Reverend Otto was like his youngest daughter, Gladys. He, too, lived in a world of dreams, his interest in his family was very impartial, very vague. Claire had been away from home for eighteen months. Yet he greeted her return as though she had just come in from a day’s shopping. He waved his spade, beamed at her with his tired, faded eyes and returned to his digging. “Potatoes ought to do really well here,” was the thought at the back of his mind. It bore, one may observe, very little reference to Claire’s arrival.
Everything was so unchanged about the garden, in the house. Mrs. Holland, stout, round and cheerful, was busy in the kitchen preparing what had always been Claire’s favourite pudding for lunch. Mrs. Holland had spent so much of her married life in the kitchen that the expression of her love did naturally fall into the channels of food. She thought of her children constantly and most often in connection with their favourite dishes. She left her labours, however, to enfold Claire in warm, encircling arms.
“Well, my biggest baby,” she whispered, “is everything well with you? I’m making you a chocolate meringue for lunch.”
And it was just here, ridiculously enough, that the ghost at the back of Claire’s joy took shape. She clung to her mother with unexpected fervour.
“Mummie,” she gasped, “everything is just the same here.”
“Are you so very changed, my dear?” she asked, sweeping the well-known figure with her eyes.
Reassuring that sight, anyway. Claire in her neat grey coat and skirt, her white silk blouse open at the throat, the green jade beads about her neck, looked radiant—flushed with youth and health.
“Run away upstairs to your room,” said Mrs. Holland, “and leave me to these meringues or lunch will never be ready.”
It was in her bedroom upstairs that Claire did most of her thinking. Her bedroom that had used to be the nursery, a large attic-shaped room with windows let into the sloping roofs and an old worn carpet on the floor. Downstairs she played a part, chattered gaily about her life in town, her work, her plans, her prospects. Not that much deception was necessary. Mrs. Holland, her mind at rest since the meringues had been a decided success, was inclined to readopt Claire into the family circle without any further probing into a fancied change. Mother-like, she saw Claire as the child she had been, could credit her with no individual life. Mr. Holland was dreamily involved in the working out of his sermon for next day, and, beyond smiling gently at Claire, took apparently very little interest in her.
After good nights had been said and the family had dispersed for the night, Mrs. Holland, candle in hand, meandered along to her eldest baby’s room just to see that she was all right. She was a little amazed to find Claire, still not undressed, sitting on her bed, apparently doing nothing.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. The candle in her hand, Claire’s candle on the dressing-table, flickered and danced, throwing strange shadows all round the room. “Why aren’t you in bed yet?” “Is anything worrying you, Claire?”
Mrs. Holland put her candle down and advanced towards her daughter.
“Have you got a pain anywhere?” she asked. “Or are you catching a cold? You always used to have thinking-fits when you were sickening for something as a child.”
Claire laughed, but there was an odd little sound of uncertainty about the laughter.
“Dear old Mumsie,” she said. “No, I am not sickening for anything. And if I have had a thinking-fit, it is finished. I am going to bed and to sleep now.”
“You are sure,” said Mrs. Holland, her hands touched tentatively on the smooth cheeks, “you feel all right?”
“Of course I am all right,” Claire laughed again and jumped up, giving her mother a quick hug, pushing her towards the door. “Go to bed, Mumsie. I’m just going to mine.”
She had made up her mind then, she had finished her thinking fit as she had said to her mother. It had needed only just this—the atmosphere of her old home, for the right and the wrong in her heart to get disentangled. Yet, for a long time, she lay thinking of the man’s face as she had last seen it, sensing the feel of his hands on hers, the fire of his lips. Life might be funny, but sometimes it was cruel, horribly cruel and love was a flame that burnt a line of agony across one’s heart.
Yet her decision once made, she never wavered from it. In church the next morning, dear old grey church, with the light filtering soft and many-coloured through its stained-glass windows, she knelt, her mind groping beyond the faintly-remembered words of service to some vague form of prayer. “Help us to be good. Help us so that it may not hurt too much.” It was a very diffident prayer, for Claire, like a great many young people of the present day, was very uncertain of her faith; could not even decide that there really was a God either to listen or understand. Still, it was in church that she came to a definite plan of action. She would go back to London and she would write Mrs. Tremayne resigning her post. Mrs. Tremayne would know the reason, there would be no arguments there. And then she would write him. Denis. She had never called him that, yet already the name was very familiar to her heart. And he would see from her letter the paths along which her normal thinking had led her, and just as he had been too chivalrous to plead against her arguments before, so he would understand now that it was, that it must be, good-bye.
“I shall never see him again,” whispered Claire into her folded hands. “Never again! Oh, let me forget, dear God, don’t let it hurt for long.”
She went back to town on the afternoon of the next day. Mrs. Holland saw her off at the station—pressed into her hands at the last moment a basket of eatables and an enormous bunch of roses.
“You’ll eat up the goodies tonight,” she said, “but the roses will last for a day or two. Claire, if you’re not happy working”—this was an afterthought born of that very faint throb of doubt she had first experienced with Claire back in the shelter of her arms—“give it up, my dear. Come straight back to us. Your father would never mind. There’s room and food for you at home, and love.”
“Of course, Mumsie,” whispered Claire in answer, fighting against unexpected, silly tears. “As if I didn’t know that!”
She had to jump into the carriage then and be whizzed away before there could be any fresh explanations, which was perhaps as well. She had been near to confusion at the moment, and, thinking of it quietly a minute or two afterwards, she could realize the horror and amazement that her confession would have brought.
It was late when she got to London—after nine o’clock. Her flat, for perhaps the first time in her ownership of it, appeared intolerably small. She worked hard at tidying it up to drive away depression. But in the little sitting-room the ghost of love that had walked to life there, would haunt her with regret. She gathered up the roses and took them into the bedroom with her, and shut the door and sat down to write her letter to Mrs. Tremayne. It could be brief and stiffly-worded, easier to write than that other letter of farewell which must follow in its wake. She was not, however—late as it was—to be immune from interruptions. The telephone bell rang even as she wrote the opening sentences. She answered it nervously, afraid that his voice would assail her ears, begging, pleading for an interview. And she so longed to see him—immediately her mind was in a whirl of contradictory influences again.
As a matter of fact, it was Mrs. Tremayne’s voice speaking. “Hullo! Is that Miss Holland? You—Claire. Oh, my dear, I’m glad you’re back. Look, child, I want you to do me a favour. Pack a few things in a bag and slip round here. You’ll get a taxi, won’t you?—it isn’t too late. I want you to spend the night with me. Denis has gone to Edinburgh and I, for some reason, am unaccountably nervous.”
“Of course, I’ll come, but isn’t anyone in the house?” asked Claire, a little taken aback, her unwritten letter in her mind.
“No, you know our one maid comes in by the day, and this morning Cook asked to be allowed to go off till Tuesday. I thought Denis would be here, so I agreed, and now Denis has had to go.” The voice broke off sharply, it was as though the speaker had been cut off. “Claire,” it began again. “You must come. I’ve got something to say to you. Quick, Claire, come quickly. I’m afraid!”
“But what of?” asked Claire. “No”—in an impatient aside to the ’phone operator—“don’t cut us off. I have not finished. Mrs. Tremayne, are you there?”
No answer came back, however, and Claire hung up the receiver, frowning a little. Mrs. Tremayne was temperamental, as her husband had said, and whatever the cause of her fear, she was no doubt working herself into hysterics at the moment. There was nothing for Claire to do but go across as quickly as she could. Farewells, explanations would have to wait. Denis had gone to Edinburgh. He often had to visit the branch of his office up there. He would probably be away for two or three days.
“I only hope,” said Claire, a little wearily to herself, taking her bag and letting herself out of the flat, “that Mrs. Tremayne doesn’t choose just tonight to talk to me about him. I don’t feel as though I could stand much without making a fool of myself.”
She had, as it happened, to walk some distance. It was later than she had at first thought, and not till she came within range of South Kensington Station did she find a taxi.
Claire had her own key to the Tremaynes’ flat. She paid off the taxi-man, said good night to him and hurried in at the front door. The lift man piloted her upstairs, clanked the gates open and watched her slip the key into the Yale lock.
“Mr. Tremayne’s away,” he volunteered, “and the servants have took the night off. Reckon you’re going to stay with Mrs. Tremayne, miss.”
“Yes,” admitted Claire, “she rang up for me. When did Mr. Tremayne leave?”
“About nine this evening, I reckon,” the man answered. Like most humble lookers-on at other people’s lives, he knew a great deal—more than one would have supposed. He knew, for instance, put into his own language, that Mr. Tremayne was sweet on his wife’s secretary and that Mrs. Tremayne was as jealous as a cat with kittens. “Looks a bit off colour to my way of thinking, Mr. Tremayne.”
Claire stiffened. “The change will do him good, perhaps,” she answered. “Good night, George.”
“Good night, miss,” said George, and swept down to the underworld again.
Claire let herself into the hall and shut the door behind her, putting her bag down on a chair.
The upstairs part of the flat was in darkness and very quiet. Claire switched on the light in the spare room, put down her bag, took off her hat and shook her hair free from its confining closeness.
Just for a minute she paused on her way downstairs to look at herself in the glass. Would others notice, she wondered, how much older and graver she had grown in the last forty-eight hours, would they notice the shadow of tears about her eyes? If Mrs. Tremayne noticed it, would she guess, would she plunge at once into unpleasant recriminations? Unspeakably, Claire dreaded meeting Mrs. Tremayne, she shrank from the coming interview.
However, it had to be faced, and as best she could she must shelter behind the fact that she intended to do the right thing.
“Well,” she said, trying to make her voice all it had ever been, light-hearted, indifferent. “I’ve come, you see, to protect you against the bogies.”
Sullen silence greeted her gay voice. It was rather as though a very cold finger had touched warningly against her lips. She paused in her advance and stared round her. Mrs. Tremayne sat in her usual place on the sofa by the open window. She was in some sort of rest gown—a soft, floating purple garment, lightened at breast and sleeves by grey chiffon. Her black hair was unbound and lay about her shoulders like a cloak. She seemed to be looking at Claire and she was twisted a little sideways on the sofa to attain this effect. Her head was pressed back against piled-up cushions, and there was that about her pose so unnatural, so strained, that Claire felt again that little spasm of fear. The room was dimly lit, for Mrs. Tremayne favoured shadowed lights in the evening, and in that first second’s pause the features of the strained, staring face were very vague to Claire.
She moved forward quickly, breaking as it were the barrier of silence that shut her in.
“Mrs. Tremayne,” she said urgently, “what is the matter? Tell me, what is it that has frightened you?” Level with the sitting figure on the sofa she paused again. Her own eyes widened, her hands went to her heart in a movement of horror. The white of Mrs. Tremayne’s throat, the soft, grey chiffon at neck and breast were marked—stained with some horrid blotch of red. Above it her face showed ashen grey, set in a perfect mask of agony, one arm lay along the back of the sofa, the fist clenched in a spasm of fear.
Claire screamed; she felt the scream struggling up through her breast, tearing its way through her quivering lips, and still the mask of Mrs. Tremayne’s face stayed staring at her, frozen and stiff.
Death is at all times and in all places a terrifying reality, and a mystery combined. Brought face to face with it, we stand startled and afraid. The awful mystery of its silence enfolds us, the grim reality of its starkness defies our hopes. Death! Something strange about an otherwise familiar, perhaps dearly-loved form, an ice-cold wind stirring across our faces.
Barely an hour ago Mrs. Tremayne had spoken to Claire over the ’phone,. three minutes ago Claire had thought of her with half-pitying, half-impatient contempt, and now Claire stood facing her. No, that was the horrible part about it, it was not Mrs. Tremayne she faced, but Death! A cold, stiff body, a face frozen in a mask of despair, red blood that had ceased to drip.
With the shriek still on her lips, Claire turned and ran from the room. Her hands beat ineffectually against the panels of the outside door before she summoned enough self-control to remember that she had latched the door on coming in. And then, just as suddenly as it had come to her, her panic left her. She was, after all, a normal young woman, well balanced, not inclined to be hysterical. There was something, she realized, ridiculous in her shrieking, stumbling flight from the figure sitting in that room.
Not that she was not still shaken. Impossible to push horror altogether out of her mind, but at least she could act more sensibly. With trembling fingers she pushed up the latch, opened the door and passed out into the general landing of the flats.
The electric light burned brightly on the floor below. George, at least had not yet retired to bed. Claire rang the lift bell and clung to the iron railings, peering down into space to catch the first welcome glimpse of another human being. He came up slowly and paused opposite her, his hand on the gate, staring at her through the bars, arrested by something he saw on her face.
“Lord lumme, miss,” he said, “what’s happened?” Claire’s hands shivered against the bars, she turned to look back into the flat she had left.
“Mrs. Tremayne,” she whispered. George opened the gate and came and stood out beside her on the landing. “In there—she’s dead. George, I think she’s been murdered!”
“Lord lumme!” he said again, his eyes wide and startled. “She’s on the sofa in the sitting-room,” Claire’s voice stumbled on. “She seems to be looking at you, as you go in. but she never speaks, never moves.” She drew nearer to the man, her hands clung to him. “George, there’s something red on her throat, it has soaked down on to the chiffon of her dress, George!”
“Now don’t you scream, miss,” said George; his eyes still stared beyond her into the passage of the flat. “It do give the place a bad name. Here, let me go and shut the door, then we’ll go downstairs and ’phone for the police, That’s the best thing for us to do, eh?”
“I suppose so,” Claire admitted. “She must be dead, mustn’t she, George? She never spoke to me, or moved.”
“Sounds like it,” agreed George; he detached himself from her and, approaching the door on tiptoe, shut it with infinite caution. “We had best ring up the doctor, too. That will make certain.”
Claire sat in his little box office downstairs while he telephoned the police and the doctor.
Dr. Martin was the first to arrive, but he had hardly stepped out of his motor-car and briefly interrogated George as to his summons, when he was followed into the hall by the police. Two officers in plain clothes, a policeman, comfortable and stolid-looking in his blue uniform.
“What’s the trouble, eh?” the foremost of them asked, his quick eyes at the same time taking in his surroundings and the three people standing in the lift-man’s office.
Dr. Martin turned to him gravely. “A tragedy, it seems,” he explained. “I am a doctor,” he produced his card and handed it to the other man. “I have attended the people upstairs professionally for the last two years.”
“Ah!” said the officer. He was a man, apparently, of few words. His eyes rested on Claire. “The young lady?” he said curtly.
Dr. Martin introduced her with a courteous wave of his hand. “Miss Holland,” he said, “Mrs. Tremayne’s secretary. Tremayne is the name of the people whom we have been called in to see.”
“Mr. Tremayne ain’t here.” George burst into hurried explanations. “He left for Edinburgh this afternoon. Mrs. Tremayne was in the flat by herself, and it appears she telephoned to Miss Holland saying as how she was nervous and would Miss Holland come over and spend the night with her. And Miss Holland came. I took her up myself about half an hour ago, and she found——”
He paused for breath and the officer, rather drily, interrupted.
“We’ll go upstairs, I think,” he said, “and hear the story afterwards. Will you show us the way, please, Miss—er—Holland?”
They filed into the lift slowly, politely making room for each other. There was something very dignified in their unhurried ascent. Dr. Martin, for one thing, would have lent dignity to any occasion by his mere presence. He was a tall, superb figure, carrying an immaculately-brushed hat in his gloved hands. The principal police officer, the only one who had so far spoken, was a small, thin, alert-faced man, clean-shaven, with a tightly-shut mouth. A man, one would say at a glance, who would never see fifty again, and who had spent the numerous years of his life very efficiently looking after his own and other people’s affairs. His companion, a much younger man with grave, sternly-cut features and very steadfastly blue eyes looked altogether of a different stamp. To begin with he bore about his person and clothes the unmistakable, though slightly old-fashioned, hall-mark of a gentleman. Thirty-four years old, perhaps, perhaps younger, it was difficult to say, for he belonged to the generation of men who took their youth and left it behind them in the grim trenches round Verdun and Ypres. He had certainly been a soldier, and just as certainly beyond that again, he had been a public school boy. And somehow or other, he had drifted into the ranks of Scotland Yard. Not without bringing a good deal of hard work to bear on it. It is as difficult a profession to succeed in as any other—only on those occasions when he stopped to think of himself or review the fourteen years that lay between himself and boyhood, Jack Wellsley did acknowledge that it was an odd profession to find himself in.
Here he was, anyway, and keenly interested into the bargain, and it was just chance—or perhaps a deliberate turn of Fate’s wheel—that had caused him to drop in on Tarleton the very evening which saw Tarleton called out on a case. Tarleton, as far as the work in Scotland Yard went, was Jack’s guide and chief instructor. They had met each other first in France and a strange friendship had sprung up between them. Indeed, it was Tarleton’s influence that had got Jack his after-the-war job, when jobs were difficult things for ex-officers to pick up.
“Like to run over it with me, kid?” Tarleton had said. He had learned to use that nickname in France, where it had been assigned to Jack, the most junior of junior subs., in private he often lapsed back into it. Immensely keen as he was on all things appertaining to his profession, Jack had eagerly jumped at the chance.
So it was that on his very first meeting with Claire he was, from the outset, intrigued by her personality. He was not a man who paid, as a rule, much attention to girls; he had his dreams, of course, of the ideal woman he would one day meet and love, but he had lived thirty-four years already without meeting her and her vision was beginning to be a little vague. That is not to say that he had never been in love, but perhaps he was unfortunate. The woman with whom he had guilelessly fallen in love had been very far from ideal. He had taken lately to shunting the sex out of his mind, replacing an ardent desire to squander affection by an equally ardent ambition to succeed in his job, so that really it was rare for him to turn and look twice at a woman’s face. But several times he looked at Claire in that stately procession of theirs up in the lift.
The liftman opened the door of the flat for them with his master key, and Tarleton signed to Claire to precede them.
“Lead us straight to the body, please, miss,” he said grimly, and he was apparently quite oblivious to Claire’s little shiver of repugnance.
The woman sat on the sofa turning over the back of it, facing the door. She was quite dead, he knew that in a glance before the doctor had swept beyond him to bend to his grave examination. There was no disorder in the room. The only thing out of its place was the telephone, one of those little table instruments—it had stood evidently on that table by the wall. Perhaps the woman had been speaking at it when she had been surprised; it lay, its cord all twisted, on the floor between the table and the sofa. She had been sitting at the table, talking at the ’phone—quickly his brain worked—and someone had come into the room and she had risen! Yes, that was right, the chair was just a little pushed back, still with the instrument in her hand. She had dropped it probably in the first spark of fear and she had retreated back, back till she put the sofa between herself and the intruder. Re-forming the picture, his mind grew keen, excited. By Jove, would Tarleton figure it out in the same way?
Stoically grave, hands in pockets, feet apart, Tarleton was watching the doctor complete his examination. His eyes had glanced round the room once and were now concentrated in a rather glum survey of—what had been Mrs. Tremayne. Behind him stood the blue uniformed policeman, attentive, interested.
“Bad-tempered woman, I bet!” was the curious thought at the back of Tarleton’s mind. He always connected black hair with bad temper, though he had really no grounds for such a supposition.
George, the liftman, hovered on the outskirts of the group. He had never been in a murder case before, though on one occasion a gentleman in the top flat had attempted to commit suicide. Claire had been left outside. She was at the moment sitting tensely upright on the chair in the hall. She had a perfect horror of making a scene, but she felt deplorably like screaming if they left her out there alone much longer.
“Dead, eh?” remarked Tarleton, presently apropos of nothing. He tilted back on his heels and gazed at the ceiling. “You wouldn’t say it was self-inflicted, eh, Doctor?”
“Quite impossible,” said the doctor; he straightened himself slowly, wiping the tips of his fingers on a large handkerchief. “You see how she has been stabbed.” He pointed to the woman’s exposed throat. “The blade has broken off there with the force of the blow. No—Mrs. Tremayne cannot possibly have killed herself.”
“And it doesn’t look accidental,” said Tarleton; once more his eye’s swept the room and paused on the second button of Jack’s coat. “Murder, eh?” he said softly.
The doctor coughed. “A ghastly tragedy,” he asserted. “Murder—base murder—motiveless—brutal.”
“Humph!” said Tarleton, “you know the people, eh? There was no one who would have a motive?”
“Most assuredly not,” said the doctor. “Mr. and Mrs. Tremayne were a most devoted couple, holding themselves singularly aloof from outside friends. This will come as a most cruel blow to the husband.”
“Motiveless,” reiterated Tarleton; he allowed his eyes to rise to a level with Jack’s. “That’s rare, eh, Wellsley?”
“There could be one pretty strong motive,” said Jack. George, the liftman, shot a rather dubious glance at him. “What about robbery?”
“Ah, yes,” said Tarleton, as if the idea had not occurred to him, which was, of course, absurd. “Let’s get down to things, Wellsley. Where is that young woman?”
“She’s outside, sir,” said the policeman.
“Sitting down,” intercepted George, not to be outdone.
“Fetch her in,” said Tarleton, briefly, and sat down himself on an adjoining chair.
It may be that the lateness of the hour made him extra brusque. He sat there at Claire’s typewriting-table in the next room while she sat facing him, and rapped out his questions at her with, Wellsley felt it to be, needless sharpness. He stood just behind himself, and, whenever Claire’s troubled hazel eyes met his, his eyes tried to reassure her.
“How long have you been with the Tremaynes?” Tarleton asked.
“About eight months,” Claire answered.
“As Mr. Tremayne’s secretary?”
“No, Mrs. Tremayne’s. Mrs. Tremayne was a writer,” Claire explained. “She would dictate her work to me and I would type it out for her.”
“Have you any—well, shall we call it—intimate knowledge of either of your employers?”
Annoying how the faint flush would stir across her pale cheeks. Claire dropped her eyes quickly.
“No,” she said, “not really. They were both very good to me. They had plenty of money.”
“Humph,” grunted Tarleton. “Mrs. Tremayne had some valuable jewellery then, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes,” Claire admitted eagerly, “beautiful things. There is a safe in the bedroom where everything was kept.”
Tarleton glanced up at Wellsley. “Just go through the rooms, Wellsley,” he said. “See if anything has been disturbed.”
He turned to Claire again as his assistant went out. “Now then,” he said crisply, “let’s have the truth as you know it, Miss Holland. Were the Tremaynes what you would call a happy couple?”
“Oh, I think so,” said Claire. “Mrs. Tremayne was—oh, well, temperamental. She would make rows sometimes about nothing, she was often very depressed for no apparent reason.”
“Bad tempered?” suggested Tarleton; that bore out his original supposition. He felt rather pleased. “Tell me again—how was it you happened to come here this evening?”
Claire told him. “Mrs. Tremayne spoke to me on the ’phone,” she said.
“You are sure if was Mrs. Tremayne?” he snapped.
“Oh, quite,” Claire answered. “She seemed very nervous. I thought she sounded hysterical. Of course, I said I would come at once. I asked her what had frightened her, but the exchange had cut us off. I could not get her again.”
Tarleton’s eyes narrowed. “That would be about what time?” he asked.
“It was just after a quarter past ten on my watch,” said Claire, “I came as quickly as I could, but I was a long time getting a taxi; it was after eleven when I got here.”
“Who let you into the flat?” asked Tarleton.
“I had a key,” she answered “I let myself in and went straight upstairs. I saw a light in the sitting-room, but I didn’t go in or call out.”
“Why on earth not?” said Tarleton, really more as though he was talking to himself than to her. “You knew she was nervous. Why not have reassured her?”
“It was hateful of me,” Claire confessed. “But you see I thought Mrs. Tremayne was being rather silly and hysterical, and I used to find it difficult to be sympathetic when she was like that.”
“Humph!” said Tarleton—it was a remark he always fell back on when his mind was busy. He glanced up on the words and looked beyond Claire to Wellsley, who had just come in again at the door. “You’ve found something?” he questioned sharply.
Wellsley nodded. He came forward and stood by the chair on which Claire was sitting.
“The safe has been opened,” he admitted. “A box has been taken out and rifled. But it looks as though the thief had been disturbed. He left his job in a hurry.”
Tarleton got slowly to his feet. “Damn,” he said grimly, “that simplifies things.” He glanced briefly at Claire. “I don’t think we need keep you, Miss Holland. You’ll leave your address, but I expect you’ll be glad to get home for tonight.”
“Oh, yes, please,” said Claire. She stood up. “I couldn’t stay here. The thought terrifies me.”
“Very well then,” agreed Tarleton, “you’ll be sent for in the morning. Oh, just one other thing”—he paused on his way out—“you have Mr. Tremayne’s address in Edinburgh, didn’t the liftman say?”
“I did not know personally that he was going,” Claire told him. “Mrs. Tremayne mentioned it on the ’phone, and when I got here George told me. He goes often on business and he always stays at the George Hotel, Princes Street.”
“Ah, that will find him then, I suppose,” said Tarleton. “Wellsley, go out and put a telegram through for me. It’s urgent. Recall Mr. Tremayne. Word it how you like.”
“Right you are,” said Wellsley. He looked from his chief to Claire. “I will see Miss Holland home, if she will permit me to,” he added. “It’s very late for a young lady to be about by herself.”
“Certainly, certainly,” agreed Tarleton. “There’s not much more will be done here tonight. Look me up in the morning.”
Claire dreaded Denis’s arrival, for he had rung up to say he was coming, and yet she longed for it. She loved him, one moment, her heart throbbed to that, and the next it had veered almost to frightened dislike.
She had been going to renounce him, with that she could comfort her conscience, had not Fate stepped in and removed the barrier that had stood in their path. Now that the path lay clear, she was afraid. What of? Her mind shirked the responsibility of finding out. To divert it, she let her thoughts drift to the man with whom she had spent the afternoon. Let it be admitted that she rather liked him. Funny that he should be a policeman or a detective or whatever he was. Policemen and detectives were not the sort of people one expected to meet and be friends with. He was so much nicer than the other one. The other one had been simply horrid with his sharp questions, his keen eyes. And to think that they had talked about her, imagined even for one moment that she had had anything to do with what had happened to Madelaine. Claire jerked back her thoughts and looked at her quiet, cool hands lying on her lap. Murder! To be murdered! To commit a murder, how horrible! Horror crept over her. She seemed to see again Madelaine’s white face, the waves of black hair about her shoulders. And she had been murdered! She had watched the knife coming perhaps, seen the hate in the eyes of the person who meant to kill her. Oh, it was horrible, horrible. The pain, the fear, these thing would be nothing compared to seeing hate grow in a human face, express itself in human hands that meant to kill you.
One must not dwell on those kind of memories, her new-found friend had told her that. Denis! Funny how difficult it seemed to call him that. He would need her help desperately. This sudden awful calamity would leave his spirit bruised and sore. He would suffer in his conscience just as she had suffered, perhaps even more—for after all, he must once upon a time have loved Madelaine. What a very strange thing love was—unaccountable! A sudden leap of the pulses that altered all the world. It must be terribly sad to love someone, to have one’s whole being pulsing and singing as hers had done when Denis had kissed her, and then gradually to stop loving. Claire realized that. He had stopped loving Madelaine before he met her. That wasn’t my fault.
She was still sitting there by the open window in the twilight, when she saw Tremayne’s erect, swinging figure coming down the street. For a second she leant forward staring at him, absurdly conscious of a pulse of fear in her throat. She wanted to run away and hide where he could never find her. Then, as he disappeared under the shadow of the house, that ridiculous thought vanished and she jumped to her feet, all eagerness to see him again. She had her door open before he reached the top of the stairs, but she stood tongue-tied before the white misery of his face. She had known that he would feel things, but she had not known that the agony of his remorse would be like this. Her own feelings, her doubts, were swallowed up in a desire to help him. She put out her hands and drew him into her flat, shutting the door behind him. She stood close against him in the little passage, the faint perfume of her hair brushing against his face.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “I’m so sorry for you. What can I do to help?”
With a little hoarse sound he crushed her to him, his lips pressed against her hair; she could feel the grip of his hands against her bare arms. She sensed the passionate desire in his hold of her, and wriggling a little free, she bent her head and kissed one of his hands.
“Come in,” she whispered, “sit down. We’ll talk. I’ve got so much to tell you.”
He let her go at once. “I haven’t lost you,” he said harshly. “God! I’ve been through agony thinking I had lost you.”
Still with his arms about her she led him into the little sitting-room and switched on the lights as she passed. She could see him more clearly now, and seeing him, Claire could decide that he spoke with no exaggeration when he said he had lived through agony. She freed herself and stood a little away from him her hands still in his.
“Why should you think you have lost me?” she asked; “as if you hadn’t enough to worry about without that.”
“Kiss me,” he whispered. “The feel of you against my heart—that will drive the other thoughts away. You’ll let me kiss you now.”
Stricken almost to tears she held herself against him and lifted her face to his. “Don’t talk like that,” she said, “it hurts both you and me. I love you—I loved you before—does kissing make all that difference?”
He crushed her to him, the passion of his lips terrified her, but she stayed quiet. Her heart and mind were set on bringing peace to his soul. She would at that moment have sacrificed her entire self to his needs.
Her calm surrender, the touch of her cool lips against his, soothed the man—the frenzy of his passion left him, he let her go and stumbling to the sofa sat down, his face buried in his hands.
“I was going mad till that moment I saw you, Claire,” he said. “It was bad enough before, but afterwards when this crashed down between us, I thought—ah, God! What didn’t I think?”
She came and knelt beside him and rubbed her soft head of hair against his.
“I had made up my mind to say good-bye, you know,” she said. “When I was down with my people I realized somehow that there really wasn’t anything else for us to do. I shouldn’t, you see, make a very good sinner; there would be a part of me that would always be conscience-stricken; it would have poisoned my joy—and——” She glanced at him shyly. “I was glad, you see, to think you loved me.”
“Don’t let us talk about it,” he said, harshly. “What there is to be found out, Tarleton and the police between them will find out. It only tortures you to think and remember and wonder. Claire,” he dropped his voice to sudden, shaken tenderness, “when will you marry me? Oh, not outwardly; I can see we mustn’t shock the world, we must do nothing that would hurt Madelaine’s memory. But privately, secretly”—the grip of his hands tightened—“just so that I may know you are mine.”
She was taken aback at the thought. “Oh, we couldn’t,” she said, “I mean—not just yet. It would seem hateful to her.”
“She’s dead,” he argued. “God knows I can’t pretend to any agony of grief for that. She has been out of my real life for years. Are you going to let her shadow stand between us in the same way, as living she herself stood?”
“No,” Claire answered, “there is nothing between us now.” She stirred a little in his arms. “But I can’t forget as quickly as all that, Denis. Let’s wait—it will not hurt us waiting.”
“I want to feel that you’re mine,” he said. “You’ve so small a conception of what love means, Claire, the restless longing that drives one. Not till you are mine shall I know definite peace.”
“But how could we?” asked Claire. “Without, I mean, without making everyone feel it was perfectly horrible of us.”
“No one need know,” he answered. “It will be natural that you should go away for a bit after the inquest and all that is over, natural that I, too, should leave the flat. We’ll go away, Claire—you and I together. You’ll trust yourself to me, won’t you? I’ll manage everything.”
Claire stayed silent, more than a little shocked. “I think,” she said presently, “we ought to wait. Will it matter to you so very much? I should feel happier if we waited.”
He stood up abruptly. “Are you playing with me?” he asked. “Before God, if I thought that——”
His eyes met her widely-startled ones and he pulled himself together, holding out his hands to her.
“Don’t keep me waiting for too long,” he said. “I’ve had nearly as much of that as I can bear, Claire.”
Claire stood up again, too, and let him take her into his arms, but her spirit was perturbed, her mind uneasy, under his kisses.
“Go away now,” she said at last. “Please, Denis, it’s late, later than you think. You must give me a little time to think it over. You see, it’s all my life, isn’t it?”
He bent his head suddenly and kissed her hands.
“Why does one love?” she asked. “It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? But I do love you. There’ll be a tomorrow for you and me.”
Yet how glad—in a way—she was to see him go. The interview had left her strained and exhausted. She sat huddled up on the sofa instead of going to bed, and buried her face against the soft, lavender-scented cushion and burst into tears. Love, as he had shown it to her, frightened and bewildered her, she felt as though she had undertaken a grimmer responsibility than her spirit was strong enough to bear. Love that should be laughter and sunshine and hope was suddenly weighted with fierce passion and hot tears.
Wellsley, meanwhile, his head in the clouds, had met Tarleton for supper and listened—really—it is painful to have to record—without much attention to his chief’s crisp survey of the afternoon’s event. Tarleton, it seemed, had met Tremayne and had been quite impressed with Tremayne’s good sense and calm self-possession. Tremayne, it appeared, had been quite frank with Tarleton, and had given him a perfectly open account of his own movements since he left the flat. That was all quite satisfactory. Tremayne had also the good sense, though Tarleton had requested him to keep quiet about that, to doubt the theory of murder for robbery. To begin with, he had been able to prove that the only things missing from the safe were some papers, the contents of which he himself did not know, but they had always appeared to be, so he had informed Tarleton, of immense value to Mrs. Tremayne. As for the man whom Mrs. Tremayne had been in the habit of receiving, Tremayne knew—as Tarleton had suspected—nothing about him. He gave Tarleton a brief survey of their married life, and admitted frankly that he knew very little of Mrs. Tremayne’s private affairs or of her life before she had married him. She had been an enormously wealthy girl whose father had made millions out of the diamond fields in Africa, and Tremayne had met her during the course of a shooting holiday in South Africa.
All this Tarleton recounted to an inattentive Wellsley; only when the elder man introduced the name of Miss Claire Holland into the story did Wellsley find himself galvanized into quick interest.
“I had tea with her as you suggested,” he put in. “And, Tarleton, you are right, there is some little thing worrying her, though, mind you, I don’t believe it has anything to do with the crime.”
“It hasn’t, my son,” said Tarleton, quite calmly. “I’ve run that little hare to earth.”
He sat back and blew smoke rings into the air, frail, ethereal circles that wavered and merged into shapeless mist.
“What do you mean?” asked Wellsley, and he sat erect, suddenly eager.
“The old, old story,” said Tarleton, and he waved a languid hand. “Bad-tempered, rather faded wife—eager-for-life husband—and pretty typist. It appears that Miss Holland and Mr. Tremayne had been running a little love affair of which Mrs. Tremayne, quite rightly, disapproved.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Wellsley hotly, quite without thinking. Tarleton chuckled.
“Love at first sight is a mug’s game, kid,” he said. “You ought always to look before you leap in case the place on which you land is already occupied. Tremayne loves his secretary all right, and if I am any judge of uneasy conscience—and I ought to be by this time—the young lady has not been exactly severe to his—ahem—passion. Are you taking it to heart?”
He glanced across with a certain keenness at his junior. He was—in his own way—fond of Jack, interested in his career, and women and girls were the very deuce the way they upset men and their careers.
Jack pushed his chair back and stood up. “Yes,” he said gravely, “I think I’ve taken it to heart!”
He threw back his head with a quick gesture and laughed not very successfully as far as the mirth of the venture was concerned. “What a damned fool I am, Tarleton. How you must be laughing at me up your sleeve! Good night. I expect I’ll be sane in the morning.” With which he swung on his heel and away out of the room.
Tarleton put a description of the wanted man in the papers. He felt that Mrs. Tremayne’s unknown visitor could probably supply quite a lot of information if he liked to come forward and do so. Meanwhile, the investigations went ahead in the usual way.
At the inquest nothing fresh was put forward, and the coroner’s verdict was “Murder, by some person or persons unknown”. Whatever knowledge he had gained Tarleton kept up his sleeve; his evidence at the inquest was very perfunctory.
Mrs. Tremayne was buried three days later. An unostentatious funeral; Tremayne walked alone behind the coffin. Claire sent a great bunch of flowers, but she did not go to the funeral herself. She stayed away at Tremayne’s urgent request. They had seen very little of each other in the intervening days since he had called at her flat. And Claire was still quite undecided what to do. A secret marriage was repugnant to her, yet she had neither the courage nor the heart definitely to refuse him.
One would say that Love had very little to do with her sensations and sometimes she would pause in a state of utter bewilderment to ask herself, “Did she love him? What was love?” Somehow events seemed to have whirled her into this predicament. When she had flirted with him in those seemingly far-off days when Mrs. Tremayne had been alive, she had never doubted but that it was love that brought the flutter to her pulses, the flame to her cheeks. When he had kissed her that first time, passion had stirred out of its life-long sleep in her being. And it must be remembered that to most girls passion is an unexplored chasm of sensations. Unawakened they stand on the brink, and are but dimly conscious of a force that terrifies and yet fascinates them. All the poetry and romance and the fairy tale of life upon which their ideas are founded can do little to help them elucidate the puzzle that the first hint of passion puts before them. What is love?
Certain it is that Claire found the responsibility of this man’s passionate devotion more than she could understand, and if she could have escaped from it—without in some sense seeming to fail herself—she would have been glad enough to do so. Escape from the thought of it she did in her friendship with Jack Wellsley. In the hours that they spent together, in the mutual interest they took in each other’s characters, for their friendship developed along the lines usually followed by a young man and a young woman once thrown together. He could not, Jack found, thrust her out of his thoughts because of Tarleton’s alleged knowledge, and as he could not dismiss her from his mind, it followed that his heart also refused to give up the hope which had woven itself into his dreams. Nearly every day he put forward some excuse which necessitated seeing her, and Tarleton, a shade grimly, acquiesced.
“We want to keep the young lady under observation,” he admitted. “You seem keen on the job, kid, stick to it. I’ll watch the other members of the happy family.”
That he was spying on her, Wellsley never admitted. He would have strained every nerve to protect her from any shadow of suspicion. In their walks together, as they talked, sitting over some simple meal in the little restaurants of Chelsea, they never once spoke of the Tremaynes or of the shadow of Mrs. Tremayne’s death.
They talked, it must be admitted, mostly of themselves, and, as is usual, Claire found out more about his life, his hopes and his ambitions, than ever he did of hers. A man in love is driven to talk of himself, he is obsessed by a desire to lay his soul bare for the beloved eyes to see, but it is the best side of himself that he instinctively puts forward for this scrutiny. It is pathetic, this human desire to make himself known to another human being with whom he hopes to share his life. For, in reality, we stand and fall alone; no one ever really knows us in the sense of understanding the complex motives that govern our lives.
Claire, anyway, heard all about Jack’s boyhood, the big, rambling house in the country, the three brothers. A little of school she heard and some—not much, for Jack was one of those men whom the war has left very silent as to their experiences—of his days in France.
The brothers had been killed there; his best friends, as he said with a sudden lowering of his eyes, had gone west. The war had marked him thus with silence, had torn a great gulf across his life.
“There was so little to come back to,” he told Claire. “None of the old friendships. Somehow, I couldn’t settle to the old life. Mother and father—well, I guess it broke them up. They sold the house, they wandered about on the Continent; a funny aimless existence. Of course, they are always delighted to see me, but I don’t really count for much to them. It is as though the wheel of their affections had run down. They don’t take any interest in life any more; they just go on living, that’s all. So I found myself absolutely on my own and I wanted to find something right out and away from the old life, the old dreams. Well, I I took up this!”
“And it interests you,” said Claire. “You like it?”
“Yes, it’s amazingly interesting work,” Jack admitted. “The motives that drive people. We dive into their lives—that is what Tarleton says—and it’s wonderful how different the understream runs to what you find on the top.”
Claire found it interesting, too. She would sit forward listening to him, her lips a little parted, her eyes eager, and all the time his heart would be saying over and over again, “I love you—I love you. You beautiful thing, are you ever going to love me?”
“It’s shocking how you waste your time with that girl,” said Tarleton one day. “Why don’t you propose and get married and have done with it?”
This was when the Tremayne murder was only a month old, but Tarleton was always one to hustle things.
“According to you,” said Wellsley stiffly, “Miss Holland is in love with Tremayne. Would there be any use in my butting in with a proposal.?”
“Faint heart never won fair lady,” mocked Tarleton—he was very fond of worn-out snags of quotations—“and women are notoriously fickle. By the way, I’ve had a letter that may interest you.”
He tossed a sheet of thin, grey notepaper across to Jack. On it was written in a precise, upright handwriting:
Dear Sir,
It has been brought to my notice that I am probably the man described in the enclosed cutting. I have been on the Continent for the past three weeks, hence my silence. I knew the late Mrs. Tremayne very well and was, indeed, lately employed on her business.
I will call on you, therefore, this afternoon, and if any of the information which I can lay before you will help to elucidate this grim affair, I, for one, shall be delighted.
Yours truly,
Nathaniel Harvey,
(Private Detective.)
Jack glanced up, having read it. “Do you think it’s promising?” he asked.
Tarleton nodded. “I think one end of the string lies in his hands,” he admitted. “Once it is in our hands, we ought to be able to follow up. Look here, Wellsley, spare me an afternoon off from your fair charmer and be with us in this interview.”
“You think you’ve found a solution?” asked Jack, ignoring the insulting start to his friend’s sentence.
“Yes, that’s about it.” Tarleton seemed to muse on the idea. “I think I’ve found a solution.” He dismissed the subject with a shrug of his shoulders. “Met Tremayne yet?” he asked.
Jack answered in the negative. He knew that Claire sometimes had appointments with Tremayne, knew this by intuition, for Claire herself never mentioned them. He had seen Tremayne at the inquest, but he had not so far met him, or been introduced to him.
“Oh, well,” said Tarleton, “we’ll have him there too this afternoon. I’ll write him a letter.”
Write it he did, forthwith, and the envelope inscribed, he studied it for a second or two, his eyes half-closed.
“Mr. Denis Tremayne,” he murmured. “Hard driven, that man—I think you’ll say so too, kid—and your hated rival.” He looked up quickly at Jack. “By Jove, I had forgotten that.”
Mr. Denis Tremayne had left the flat on the Embankment. He had taken rooms in the Albany. It was understood that he was proposing shortly to go abroad. He rang up, however, on the receipt of Tarleton’s note, to suggest his present rooms as a meeting-place for the afternoon.
“If he can throw any light on the mystery,” he added over the ’phone to Tarleton, “I shall, of course, put off my departure, while any slight clue is followed up.”
At half-past three exactly, Nathaniel Harvey presented himself at the door of Tarleton’s office, and was admitted at once.
Jack, waiting outside with the car that was to conduct them to the Albany, decided that he had never seen anyone who in personal appearance alone succeeded so well in living up to the role of private detective.
Nathaniel Harvey was long and thin and lithe, and infinitely—one detected that at once—secretive. He had big, drooping, dark moustachios, and very pallid hands. Into Tarleton’s office he disappeared, and there he remained—Jack timed it on his wrist watch—for over half and hour. Evidently the clue, or the end of the string as Tarleton more dramatically would prefer to allude to it, was being very thoroughly examined. Jack felt a little annoyed at being left out of things—the more so as this afternoon was an afternoon wasted, so far as Claire was concerned.
However, in due course out the two detectives came, Tarleton leading, apparently extremely jubilant.
“This is my young colleague on this case.” He introduced Jack. “Mr. Harvey has brought some amazingly interesting points to my notice,” he added. “Mr. Tremayne will be interested and pretty well upset, I guess.”
He hustled his two companions into the car and took the wheel himself. Jack being in the dicky seat had to lean forward to hear what Mr. Nathaniel Harvey was saying, and to answer from time to time, for Tarleton was far too busy steering to bother with conversation.
“A strange thing, human nature,” said Mr. Harvey in a flat, quiet tone. “Have you had much time to devote to the study of it, Mr.—er——”
“Wellsley,” shouted Jack into the pale austere ear nearest him. Mr. Harvey brushed a hand across the organ that had been offended by so much noise.
“Wellsley,” he repeated in his level voice, “it requires—you may take it from me as one who knows—years of patient study before you can be in a position to say this man did that from such and such a motive.”
“Can you ever?” asked Jack.
“Most assuredly, most assuredly. That is how—I may as well admit at once—I have built up my reputation—earned my income,” said Mr. Harvey. “All through a knowledge of the motives that drive men—aye, and women.”
The car swung out of Piccadilly, slithered up Bond Street, and turned into Burlington Street.
“Here we are,” said Tarleton. He drew up at the pavement nearest the Burlington Arcade. “I leave the car here. The commissionaire looks after it for me.”
He led the way with his short, quick steps, the lithe and quiet Mr. Harvey suiting his longer strides to correspond.
“I’ve never met Mr. Tremayne, my late client’s husband,” he confessed. “The meeting will be fraught with interest.”
“He is,” said Tarleton quietly, “a very interesting gentleman.” He turned in at the Albany and nodded to the gatekeeper. “Mr. Tremayne at home?” he asked.
“Afraid I don’t know, sir,” the man answered, “but the lift boy will be able to tell you.”
Mr. Tremayne was, of course, at home. He rose from an easy chair by the window to greet them as they were announced. He stood with his back to the light so that in that first moment of introduction his features were shadowy to Jack. But even so, dimly seen, his personality, his presence impressed itself on Jack as being powerful, compelling, handsome. He was a tall man, finely made, hair a little greying over the temples, eyes startling vivid in the setting of a very still face. His manner was irreproachable, easy, yet restrained. For a second, Jack held his hand and felt it strongly muscled, cool, capable. Then Mr. Tremayne had waved them all to seats and sat down himself again at the upright chair near the writing-table.
“Well?” he said, and his question was directed at Tarleton, though his eyes swept back quickly to Nathaniel Harvey.
“Mr. Nathaniel Harvey has got an interesting story to tell, Mr. Tremayne,” said Tarleton briskly. Glancing at him, Jack was more than a little intrigued to see that his chief appeared to be adopting an attitude of breezy casualness, either for Mr. Tremayne’s or Mr. Harvey’s benefit. The features of his face had altered even to fit the part he chose to play. “I’ll leave him to tell it in his own words, though; he’s more command of the facts than I have.”
This from Tarleton! Jack sat forward eagerly, intent. There was something afoot in Tarleton’s mind, and as yet he had no shadow of an idea what it would be.
“Please, Mr. Harvey,” Tremayne was saying, very polite, very grave.
Mr. Harvey cleared his throat. It was a surprisingly loud noise for him to make, and he did it very deliberately.
“To begin with,” he said, a shade of pomposity in his voice, “I must tell you, Mr. Tremayne, that I have known your wife for a long time. Far longer—if I may say so—than you have done. For my acquaintanceship—my official knowledge of her—dates from the time when she was a schoolgirl in Natal. Mr. Wargrave, the late Mrs. Tremayne’s father, was, as you of course know, an extremely wealthy man. He had made his wealth out of the diamond-fields, and, as is the case of many men who amass their wealth under such conditions, there were one or two details and episodes in his life to which he did not care to refer. He had, however—here I speak with knowledge—one particularly ugly secret in his past, and the shadow of its haunting was what first drove him to seek my assistance.”
He paused and looked round him. Tremayne sat, with lowered eyes, his fingers fidgeting with a paper-knife on the table in front of him; Tarleton lay back in a characteristic attitude studying the ceiling; Jack, despite all good resolutions to the contrary, was staring at Tremayne. Nathaniel Harvey also let his eyes rest on that gentleman for a second or two, then he tightened his mouth into a quaint caricature of a smile under his drooping moustache, and went on with his story.
“It was then, gentlemen, that I first made the acquaintance of that arresting girl, who a few years later was to take Europe by storm with her beauty and her wealth. She was sixteen at the time, and leaving home to enter a young ladies’ college in Durban; and it was to protect her life from the dastardly attempts that he expected would be made on it, that old Wargrave engaged my services.”
Tarleton sat up with a jerk. Tremayne lifted strangely intent eyes and stared at the speaker.
“So her life was threatened, even then,” said Tarleton.
Mr. Harvey nodded. “It was threatened by the shadow of a crime that haunted her father’s life. That story I know only vaguely, fragments gathered from Wargrave’s disjointed account. To the end he was very secretive, mumbling only when drunk the story of a man whom he had bitterly wronged, of a woman who had died, and a child who had lived to carry on the hate. But that the hate was carried on, of that I have definite proof, for Mr. Wargrave was found murdered one morning a year or two later. Miss Wargrave, the lady who afterwards became your wife, was at home when the tragedy occurred, and I was the first person whom she sent for. We had met, as I have said before, and she knew enough of her heritage to realize that her father had employed me to watch over her safety. She took the blow of his death steadfastly. I do not know that there was much affection between them. I remember her saying, ‘He has paid his debts. The ugly story ends here.’ I was not so sure of that myself, and less sure than ever when the old man’s papers were gone into. He had left the whole bulk of his immense fortune to his daughter on the understanding that she kept in her possession, unopened till the day of her death, a sealed packet which she would find in a secret place in his safe. Miss Wargrave heard the will read in silence and accepted the custody of the packet, and from that day I myself have always feared some such event as the one we are at present investigating.”
“You mean,” said Tarleton, “that you believed that someone would attempt to gain possession of that packet at all costs?”
“That is what I believed. Miss Wargrave as she then was, Mrs. Tremayne as she became, shared my belief. She retained my services, in short, to protect her from any such attack.”
“You know, I gather, nothing of this?” said Tarleton to Mr. Tremayne.
The man stirred and shifted, his eyes on the paper-knife.
“It would not be quite true to say that I knew nothing,” he answered slowly. “In the intimacies of married life it would be very difficult for a wife to keep such a secret, such a fear, entirely to herself. I knew, naturally, that there was someone who belonged, I gathered, to her father’s past, of whom Madelaine was afraid; and I was aware that that box in the safe contained papers which had to do do with this secret fear.”
“She did not, I suppose, tell you,” asked Mr. Harvey, “that this man, whom she had cause to fear, was her stepbrother?”
Tremayne looked up quickly. “No,” he said, “that she did not tell me. She was always averse to speaking on the subject. I think we only referred to it twice in our married life.”
Mr. Harvey nodded a grave head. “Yes, he was her step-brother,” he went on. “That fact Mrs. Tremayne and I established some time ago.”
“Had she ever met him?” asked Tremayne. “Did they correspond?”
“Once, to my knowledge, they met,” Harvey answered, “Mrs. Tremayne was under the impression that she could come to terms. She was willing, I believe, to offer half her fortune, but he quite definitely refused. Nothing but the possession of the sealed packet which Mrs. Tremayne had accepted on trust from her father would satisfy him. I was present at the interview, and, I may add, that it ended bitterly, the man saying that he should not rest until the thing that was his by rights lay in his hands.”
“And this was how long ago?” put in Tarleton. “Mr. Tremayne, have we your leave to smoke?”
Mr. Tremayne nodded, absently pushing an open box of cigarettes towards Jack and Tarleton, his eyes were fixed on Harvey’s face.
“About six months ago,” the man answered.
“Then you think,” said Tremayne, “that he—this man—called on the chance of being able to rifle the safe that night, thinking that we were both away, that my wife surprised him and that he killed her to obtain what he desired?”
“It may—alas—be so,” admitted Harvey. “He was, I know, a desperate man with an inheritance of bitter wrong done, causing a ferment in his blood.”
“Wait a minute,” said Tarleton; he leant forward towards Jack. “Do you remember that torn scrap of paper I found under the sofa?”
“Yes,” Jack answered. “You thought it looked, didn’t you, as though she were expecting a visit from someone?”
“I did, and still do,” said Tarleton. “I have it here.” He fetched out a neat, compact pocket-case and extracted a well-smoothed bit of paper, handing it to Tremayne. “What do you make of that, Mr. Tremayne?” he asked.
“It’s my wife’s handwriting,” said Tremayne; not a muscle of his face moved; he handed on the paper to Nathaniel Harvey.
Mr. Nathaniel Harvey had to adjust glasses before he could read. “Yes, it’s Mrs. Tremayne’s handwriting,” he admitted. “But what she means I am blessed if I know. ‘His silence has made me afraid’—there wasn’t much silence about Mr. Wargrave junior where she was concerned.”
“It is just possible,” said Tremayne, “that that scribble was merely part of one of my wife’s rough notes for a story. She was a writer, you know, and was in the habit of jotting down sentences or lines as they came to her.”
“Perhaps,” admitted Tarleton. He took his precious bit of paper back again. “Well, the thing I suppose is to get on the track of Mr. Wargrave, junior. Can you help me in that, Mr. Harvey?”
“Very little, I am afraid,” acknowledged Mr. Harvey. “I may admit that I was on his tracks when the news of my client’s appalling death recalled me to England. When we last communicated with him he was in Naples.”
“You communicated with him—eh?” asked Tarleton.
“Money,” Harvey explained. “She was in the habit of sending him money. On this occasion I had been deputed to carry him £500, but at Naples I could find no trace of him and circumstances, as I have said, hurried my return home.”
Tarleton looked across at Jack. “Wellsley,” he said, “it’s a case of Naples for you. Mr. Harvey will, I know, supply you with every assistance he can. We’ve got to get on that man’s tracks. You agree, Mr. Tremayne?”
“I certainly do,” said Tremayne. “And I am happy to think what capable hands the case rests in.” He stood up. “For myself, I confess to being a tangle of jarred nerves, and London in my present state is overpowering. I have rented a little cottage at Goring, and retire there from tomorrow. When, and if I am wanted, you will send for me, will you not?”
“We will,” said Tarleton. “This may take us months to get to the bottom of, Mr. Tremayne, but to the bottom we shall get. My blood’s roused.”
He shook hands vigorously and strode out of the room, followed by his colleagues. Outside in Burlington Street he paused a second, a ruminative eye on Jack, then he seemed to come to a sudden decision.
“Off you go and pack up, my lad,” he said. “Be ready to catch the night mail, will you, and come round for orders about nine. I’ve a little matter to discuss with Mr. Harvey so you’ll have to find you own way home.”
With which curt dismissal he turned on his heel, and, with one hand slid into Mr. Nathaniel Harvey’s thin arm, he led him away.
In the midst of his packing and getting ready to catch the night mail to the Continent, Wellsley found time to call and say good-bye to Claire.
“It is good-bye, too,” she admitted, eyes not meeting his. “I was going to write and tell you I am leaving London.”
“Why and when?” asked Jack. He settled himself on the sofa and fixed her with a pair of attentive eyes. She seemed worried about something, he noticed; her eyes almost gave away the fact that she had been crying.
“Oh, well,” she fenced against his question. “I’m not a lady of leisure, you know. I had to look out for another job.”
“And you’ve got one,” he probed. “Where?”
“I may be going abroad.” Claire essayed sudden frankness. “It’s all very uncertain, but I mightn’t be here when you get back.”
Looking at her, the colour suddenly flushed his face. “You know,” he said, “I shan’t let you go like that.”
Startled eyes met his for a second. Claire got up quickly.
“You——” she began.
He put out a firm hand and caught one of hers, and saw her face whiten and flushed at his touch.
“You know,” he announced, “that I love you.”
She broke free quickly and moved to the window, standing with her back to him.
“You can’t,” she said; “you hardly know me, and, anyway, I . . .”
“Yes, you?” he asked softly, and stood up and crossed over to stand beside her. Absurd the way her soft crown of hair barely reached to his shoulder. “What about you?”
She turned to face him. Her eyes now were desperate, like a child’s that is afraid.
“I’m going to be married.” The words came in a little rush; he could see her hands clenching and unclenching. “Please don’t ask me anything more—don’t try to persuade me. I was engaged really before I met you. Oh, you must think of me what you like, but I wasn’t to know that you would think you loved me.”
“Think,” he repeated; he could really only stare at her. “But, my dear——”
“Ah, don’t,” she interrupted. “Please, please don’t. If you love me—you say you love me—you’ll go away now, at once. I can’t give you anything. I can’t. And——”
Suddenly something in her queer, self-erected barrier of reserve broke. “It hurts,” she ended with a little wail.
“But if you love me,” he began doggedly.
“I don’t, oh, I don’t,” she cried. “I—don’t you see—I can’t.”
He did not see, but something within him was desperately hurt, and, as is the way of man when he is hurt, he grew tactless.
“It’s Tremayne, I suppose,” he said stiffly.
She nodded, watching him with wide, frightened eyes.
“Then it’s true,” he flung at her. “My God, I wouldn’t believe it when Tarleton told me. Tarleton said Tremayne was your lover before his wife’s death.”
“You’ve no right to say a thing like that to me,” she said.
“Haven’t I?” he answered grimly. “I apologize.” The room seemed suddenly intolerably small to him, airless. He turned away, strode to the door and flung it open. “Good-bye,” he said, “I hope you’ll be gloriously happy.”
It was childish, their parting. Long after, he was to remember that bit of it, the anger forgotten. By the time he had packed himself and his scanty luggage into the train he was in the mood to crawl back and ask forgiveness, at any cost. But the train gave him small chance. He had only just succeeded in catching it; it was waiting for no change of plans. Its swift hurry through the darkness was almost as relentless as Fate. And, anyway, what would have been the good of his apology? If she was going to marry Tremayne, what was there that he could do to prevent it? A memory of her eyes, wide and frightened, haunted him. She had said it hurt to say “good-bye” to him. Supposing he had been gentler, had not lost his temper; supposing he had taken her into his arms and kissed her, might not she—would not she . . .? His thoughts tortured by sweet imaginings broke off.
He wrote her a letter from Dover. The first love-letter of his life, and tore it up before the boat sailed. Letters were no use. He must hurry up with his job and get back to her. He might still be in time. They could not be going to get married so soon.
If one had done this or that, would it alter life? Claire was married in a Register Office a few days later. Her quarrel with Jack seemed to precipitate matters.
She had neither the will nor the heart to argue any further. It was all done with intense secrecy. She was to tell no one. Her people thought she was going as secretary to a man who was globe-trotting round the world.
“Has he a wife, dear?” Mrs. Holland had asked. “Will you be properly chaperoned?”
She had been a little worried at Claire’s answer, that secretaries did not require chaperons, they chaperoned. Still, it was nice to think of Claire travelling, seeing the world. She would not be gone for long, and she would write very regularly.
The deceit hurt Claire, but there was so much to hurt her in those days, it slid in with the rest, unnoticed.
Never did a girl face the thought of her marriage with more shrinking aversion. The only glimmer of light in all the gloom was the joy which she was bringing Denis. In some queer way, Claire felt horribly responsible for Denis’s happiness. It was as though it lay in her hands and the slightest carelessness would send it shattered and broken to her feet. Out of all else emerged the fact that she who had once thought she so loved him, must now, at all costs, go on pretending, lest he stumbled on the truth. There was in her attitude towards him an almost maternal sense of pity.
So they were married in the square, cold room of the Register Office, two streets behind where Claire’s little flat had been. A cold, blank service, but it fitted better into her mood than would the panoply of an ordinary marriage. When they stood side by side outside after the last words had been said, the last named signed, Claire slid her hand into Denis’s.
“There’s a church just round the corner, Denis,” she said.
“Let’s go there—will you mind?”
His hand had closed on her with almost painful intensity. “I’m not a church-goer,” he answered. “Do you want to?”
She nodded, not looking at him. “Daddy and Mummy would so hate this,” she explained. “I feel so cut away from them.”
“All right,” he acquiesced at once. “You lead the way, Claire.”
They walked in a strangely-held silence down the sunshine-flecked street and turned in at the church door. It was an old, dim church; it gave one a sudden sense of solitude and quiet. Claire, her hand still in Denis’s, slipped into one of the back pews and knelt down. She felt him kneeling beside her, stiff and erect, eyes uncovered, facing the coloured lights that flickered down on the altar. She hid her own eyes and prayed to the vague God, in whom she knew her father and mother believed. Queer little disjointed prayers. “Help me to make him happy. . . .”
And, on the thought of Madelaine, she raised her head and glanced up at Denis. He knelt so straight and stiff beside her, his face held something that made her afraid. She touched him quickly with her soft, warm hand.
“What’s the matter, Denis?” she whispered.
He turned sharply, as though her whisper stung. “Did you see that woman in front of the altar just now?” he asked harshly.
“No,” she admitted, shaken to surprise. “I had my eyes covered. She’s not there now, is he, Denis?”
He stood up abruptly. “Let’s get outside,” he ordered; she realized it to be an order. “This place gets on my nerves.”
She was sorry she had made him go in. It had been selfish of her, she realized. Prayers! One should be able to say one’s prayers anywhere, and Denis had had so much gloom to contend with lately. She put her hand through his arm and held close to him.
“Where are we going now, Denis?” she asked. “This is the beginning of our new life.”
She could not chase the shadow from his eyes. He was taciturn, silent. In the afternoon their shopping being done, for Claire had been buying an outfit which she had not had time to get before, they took the train down to Goring. He lived there in the little cottage he had taken under another name. He had engaged a new staff of servants; they were expecting him to bring back his bride tonight.
“It seemed wiser,” he explained. “One doesn’t want a lot of damned fools talking about us.”
“No,” she agreed. She realized that most of the newspaper public would be interested in Mr. Tremayne, the man whose wife had been murdered.
There was a car waiting at the station for them. A smart chauffeur, who grinned his welcome at what he designated to himself, “The happy couple”. Sitting back in its shadows Denis took Claire into his arms, his lips found her lips, her hair, her eyes.
“You are mine,” she heard the hoarse passion in his voice. “Mine. Claire, say you love me.”
Funny how often he asked her to say that. She laid cool lips against his cheek and whispered it. “I love you,” she said. Women can lie well under the stress of pity. Her heart was beginning to feel sick with fear. She dreaded the shut-in-ness that the night would bring, the inevitable surrender that lay in front of her. Stark reality had to be faced, let her pretend as long as she could.
The cottage was charming. Claire could wax enthusiastic over that. She went from room to room. The windows, wide open, let in the scent of roses and honeysuckle; standing out in the porch you could hear the lazy “lap, lap” of the river at the edge of the lawn.
“Oh, Denis, let’s go down to the river after dinner,” she said. “It sounds so heavenly!”
Putting off what had to come, she knew it to be that. Fear looked at her out of the eyes in the glass as she got ready for dinner. When Denis came quietly into the room and stood behind her, stooping to kiss her bare neck, she had to stifle a scream, hide it in a laugh.
“What a shock you gave me,” she said, and let herself be pulled into his arms and hid her face against him so that he could kiss only the top of her head.
They walked down to the river’s edge after dinner and found a seat, and sat there hand held in hand, the beauty of the night stealing like silence among their thoughts. Claire felt happier now. After all, what had she been so frightened over? Marriage was terrifying, perhaps. It meant giving so much. Madelaine had said to her once that Love was as primitive as hate and murder and death. Perhaps it was that that frightened her. She knew so little of love. When Jack had spoken to her about it, when she had seen his face flushed and eager, known him near her, she had felt—oh, what was it she had felt? Had that been love?
She thought of Jack, and the thought brought warm soft tears to her heart because now she would never see him again, never hear his voice, never feel him near. And if that was love, it was wicked of her to feel it, because now she was Denis’s wife. Denis had had such need of her, it meant so much to him that she was near. Surely love did not mean selfishness, it meant giving—even to the very last of what you had to give, to serve another’s need. Denis seemed content to sit quiet and brood. The night was very wonderful, hung with faint stars. The river was restless, murmuring all the time in an undertone.
“What are you thinking of?” he asked presently, fingers touching her hair.
“Just nothing,” she answered quickly. “The river is lulling me into a beautiful calm.”
“You are happy?” he asked. She felt his arms tighten about her, the quality of his voice altered sharply. “Claire, in that church today, I thought I saw Madelaine.”
That was what had worried him then? How like a child he was, needing her help.
“You torture yourself with such queer fancies,” she said; “it was a woman who walked a little like her, perhaps.”
“It would be like her,” he said with intense bitterness, “to dog my happiness and try and frighten you from my side.”
She turned to him quickly, putting her face against his. “Hush,” she said, “you are not to say that kind of thing—or think it. She loved you; do you think she’d try to hurt you now she is dead?”
“She tries to come between us dead, as she did living,” Denis answered. He stood up. “Let’s go back to the house, Claire,” he said. “Light all the lamps we can find, drive out the dark. I hate the dark.”
He laughed, she thought, rather strangely, and moved quickly towards the house. Claire had to run to catch up with him.
“I thought you were loving it,” she said, “as I loved it.”
They reached the cottage and he strode in in front of her, turning the light up, standing and staring round him defiantly. The maids had evidently gone to bed; the rest of the house lay quiet and shadowed. Denis went quickly from room to room, turning on the lights. When he came back to her in the hall, she thought how queer his eyes looked, how strained his lips.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” he asked, and laughed again. “Not much room for shadows now. Are you going to bed, Claire?”
She stood looking at him a little puzzled, with fear just waking again behind the wonder.
“Yes,” she said, and hesitated.
He swung round to face her; he had been staring intently at the top of the stairs where her bedroom door showed open.
“I’m not coming with you tonight,” he said sharply, almost too loudly. “You’ll forgive me, I know. But my nerves are all anyhow. I’m not fit”—wild and haggard, his eyes met hers—“to touch the tips of your fingers.”
And then, suddenly, to her perturbed horror, he knelt in front of her, burying his face against the chiffon of her dress. “Oh my God!” she heard the tortured murmur of his lips. “Don’t doubt my love for you because of this.”
Claire struggled against a desire to draw back from his touch. She could see that what he had said was true, his nerves were strained close to the breaking-point. A wonderful pity woke in her heart, looking down at him.
“Dear,” she whispered, touching his bent head with soft hands, “don’t fret that silly old heart of yours. Of course, I understand. And I’m going to bed now and so are you. Get up, Denis, and kiss me good night.”
He stumbled to his feet and she stood on tip-toe beside him and kissed him with cool lips, but even as she touched him she saw his eyes staring beyond her, and he made no effort to return her kiss.
When she turned at the top of the stairs to look back at him, he had gone, driven by some strange impulse out again into the night.
That was how their married life started, and in the days that followed Claire came to feel that she was playing principal role in some gigantic joke staged for the purpose of breaking her pride. For she had sacrificed much to her idea of Denis’s need for her, and it seemed he had no need at all. She was as resolutely shut outside his life as she would have been had she erected the barrier of her love for Jack between them. She was a wife in nothing—not even in name, since they lived their queer, jumbled existence under an assumed one.
And yet Denis loved her. Pity could not let her doubt that. Was it that passion had in reality driven him mad? There was no one of whom she could ask questions, no one in whom she could confide. His strangeness kept fear awake in her heart, his obsession—for such she took it to be—came to work on her mind. In some weird way, though she saw and felt nothing tangible, the cottage seemed to be haunted with memories of Madelaine; it was Madelaine, she felt, who stood between Denis and herself.
She never dared speak to him about it; he shut speech, except of the most trivial description, outside their times together. Every day he went up to town and came back in the evening, tired and despondent. But despite his tiredness he was always restless. They would go for long walks in the evenings, stay out to supper at some hotel, come back late. He would say good night to her outside. “I’ll stop for a last pipe,” he would mumble, but Claire knew it was because he hated the cottage. He had got that strange, horrible idea of Madelaine being there. She came to hate it, too.
The days while he was away Claire filled as best she could. Somehow, with his going, the shadow lifted from the house. It was charming and old-fashioned, the garden beautiful. Claire would pick great armfuls of flowers and bring them in and arrange them in all the rooms. She was always scheming things that she thought would drive his sense of unease away. Once or twice she went up to London with him; they did a theatre or two, and dined at some fashionable restaurant. But it was all, Claire felt, a rather pitiful attempt at gaiety. She could not understand the deadlock in their relationship; she was not old enough or experienced enough to treat it with frankness. If she had loved him things would perhaps have fallen into easier lines, but she did not love him, though she did her best to help.
Anyway, it was an immense relief to her when one day Denis came home from London and announced that their passages were booked, and that they would be sailing in about ten days’ time.
He seemed this evening more normal; more like his old self than she had seen him since their marriage.
“To get away from England,” he said. “That’s what has been the matter with me. It has been a hideous time this last two months, hasn’t it?”
He sat beside her on the sofa, waiting for dinner to be announced; his hand caught and held hers.
“The ugliness will lift, won’t it, Claire, once we get away?”
His eyes seemed to search hers for reassurance. Claire smiled back.
“Of course,” she agreed. “Where are we going, Denis?”
“We’ve got the world to choose from,” he answered. “But I think we’ll make it East Africa. I’ve been hearing a lot about it lately. There’s land and to spare out there. Miles of it, and no one to bother who you are or what you’ve come from.” He stooped suddenly and kissed her hand. “Claire,” he whispered, “you’ve been an angel to me through this nightmare. I’ll make a new life for you out there, I swear that.”
Her eyes suddenly filled with stupid, hot tears. “I don’t seem able to help you in any way,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if you wouldn’t be happier going away quite by yourself.”
“If I went by myself it would be into another world altogether,” he answered grimly. “Don’t doubt my love for you, Claire—that drives me mad. It’s——” He put his face suddenly close to hers. “Haven’t you felt her?” he whispered tensely. “Been conscious of her? She permeates this house.”
He stood up abruptly, his eyes full of the same wild staring. “It’s her damned jealousy,” he said. “It shuts me in.”
Claire stood up, too, level with him, her head a little thrown back.
“Denis, don’t,” she said sharply. “You torture yourself, you torture me. I’m frightened of you when you talk like that.” She glanced round her, tears caught at her throat. “I am frightened of this house, of you.”
His face altered sharply; it was as though, he pulled a mask across it.
“I’m a damned fool,” he said. He touched her gently. “Don’t be frightened, Claire; there’s nothing in it all that touches you. Let’s talk about East Africa. I haven’t confessed all yet.” He sat down again on the sofa and patted the place next him. “I have bought a place out there,” he acknowledged.
Claire swallowed back her tears and sat down beside him.
“Oh!” She must enter into his mood, she realized, if they were both to keep sane. “How exciting, Denis. Tell me.”
He unfolded a large sheet of paper from one of his pockets and showed her a map, roughly drawn.
“Here’s the railway,” he said, “from the coast. You follow it’s line, eh? Mombassa—that’s where we land, Nairobi, Nakuru. We leave the train there—though I believe they are building a branch line that will come a bit nearer to us.”
He paused and glanced at her. “We are right out in the blue. Will you mind?” he asked.
Claire did not answer his question; her head was bent over the map. It conveyed so little to her. Mountains, she could recognize them, she had always been fond of drawing them in at school.
“What’s this mountain?” she asked, and touched with her finger a blur on the map.
“That’s Elgon,” he answered. “We are away just there at the foot of one of the spurs. A thousand acres—good maize land, they say. See, here’s the road.”
A thin, little faint track of black travelling across a seemingly expanse of bareness! A shiver caught at Claire’s heart; it was as though in imagination the loneliness closed round her.
“What’s the nearest place to us?” she asked.
“Eldoret,” he pointed it out; “it’s only thirty miles away. The railway is going to come as far as that. We’ll take out a car with us—a Dodge, eh! You shall learn to drive.” He was folding up the map with lean, strong fingers. “Thirty miles is nothing in a car.”
All through dinner Claire was stupidly visioning that little, thin track crawling across great open spaces. Land, miles of it! That was what Denis had said; she must be in a very bad state of nerves indeed to let the idea so appal her.
At least talking of it seemed to keep him sane—almost happy. She could not break into his pleasure with her fear.
Later on in the evening he told her that he had seen Tarleton that afternoon.
“He asked after you,” he said. “He doesn’t, of course, know we are married.”
Claire flushed. “I suppose not,” she agreed. “What did you tell him?”
“I said I believed you had got a job somewhere,” Denis answered. “They are still on a wild-goose chase after Madelaine’s half-brother.”
Jack had been going to Naples, Claire remembered, to see if he could find the man. What thousands of years ago it seemed since Jack had said to her, “I love you.”
“They haven’t found him then?” she asked.
“Not in Naples,” Denis answered. “He had gone, it seems, to America. I believe young Wellsley’s followed him there.” His lips twisted into the odd smile that any mention of the case always brought to his face. “I don’t know what Tarleton thinks he is going to get out of this,” he said.
“Did you tell him you were going away?” Claire asked.
He nodded. “I mentioned it, but not where or when. I want to be lost to all of them. I don’t think I shall ever want to come back to England again.”
“If they found out anything, they would have to let you know,” she said.
“Oh, my address is c.o. my bankers,” he answered. “That will find me as much as I want to be found.”
Once they had settled they were going there was a great deal to do. The days passed in a whirl of preparations and packing. Claire spent two of them down at her own home. There were two letters for her there from Jack. They had been forwarded from her flat in London. Mrs. Holland had kept them, thinking she would soon be coming down.
Claire took them out into the garden to read. They were not exactly love letters, but they showed very plainly all Jack felt:
I am not saying a word against him, if you love him how should I? but I don’t believe you do. It’s presumption and all the rest of it, but I believe you love me. And I, my dear, most certainly love you. Don’t do anything rash till I come back. This damned chase is dancing me off to America. Wait till I’ve seen you again, Claire. I was an insufferable idiot that last time, but, when you told me about marrying Tremayne, it was as though someone had hit me between the eyes. Claire, I don’t think your eyes have ever lied to me. I don’t believe they could. I believe you love me. I’m building all on that.
Claire cried over his letters. Not that that helped much, but all the accumulation of her misery since her marriage seemed to be emphasized by those written words of Jack’s, “Don’t do anything rash!”
“But I’ve done it, my dear,” she whispered through her tears. “I’ve got to try and live up to it. You, above everyone else would like me to play the game.”
I’ve got your two letters, she wrote in answer. What can I say? I married Mr. Tremayne a month ago. We are leaving England in ten days’ lime. Think of me as kindly as you can. At least, I never meant it to hurt you—you will believe that.
No word of love in her letter, no pitiful admission of defeat. There was too much courage in Claire’s composition to let her whine for sympathy because she had been hurt.
Mrs. Holland was inclined to be worried about her daughter, but as usual the worry had to be suppressed. She thought Claire looked older—as though the experiences she had gone through, and they must, of course, have been terribly painful, had been too much for her young vitality.
“She should never, at her age,” Mrs. Holland confided to Mr. Holland, “have had to live through an experience like that murder—oh, horrible! Who could think of it touching any of our lives?”
“Quite so,” Mr. Holland agreed. “But then, my dear, girls won’t stay at home nowadays. How can we protect them? I hate the idea of Claire going off on this tour. But can we stop it?”
Mrs. Holland had to admit they could not. It tore at her heart to watch Claire go—but she could not say anything about it.
Claire went back to Goring, and walking up from the station came face to face with Mr. Tarleton. It was at the end of the village street, as a matter of fact, within sight of the cottage. There was nothing incongruous in Tarleton’s appearance, yet it sent a quick shock of fear to Claire’s heart. He was strolling, when she first saw him, down the very centre of the street, studying with his usual air of intense interest, the houses on either side, but it was evident that he caught sight of her at once, recognized her in a flash. Retreat was impossible; with what calmness she could, she walked forward to meet him.
Tarleton crossed to her side of the road, his hat in his hand.
“Miss Holland, isn’t it?” he said. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Really,” said Claire. “Why should you have been? And what are you doing in this part of the world? Didn’t Mr. Tremayne tell you I had got a new job?” she asked. Her first lie had been very foolish, she realized that with a little stab of discomfort. “For I have. I am going abroad.”
“Now that’s very interesting,” said Tarleton. “I wish you every success. By the way,” he turned and looked down the village street. “Mr. Tremayne isn’t here today. He’s up in town.”
“Oh, how annoying!” said Claire. She turned, half hesitating. “Are you going back to town, Mr. Tarleton?”
She was a little amazed at the low chuckle of amusement that broke from him; her eyes attempted to challenge his with disdain.
“It’s no use, young lady,” chuckled Tarleton. “Had I been poor young Wellsley, I could understand this deceit.”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked. He put a quick, reassuring hand on her arm.
“Now then,” he said, “don’t get excited; There’s no reason that I can see why you shouldn’t have married the man, and all things considered, perhaps it was as well not to make a song and dance over it.” He waxed more confidential. “Broke poor Wellsley’s heart, though. That was a bit unnecessary.”
“Please,” said Claire stiffly; she drew away from the touch of his hand. “I can’t attempt to understand what you mean. About the first part—yes. Mr. Tremayne and I are married and we did not think it necessary for everyone to know.”
“Quite so,” he agreed. His chuckle had disappeared, his face seemed even grim in its gravity. “And you are going abroad, eh? Well, good luck, as I said before. You don’t think of me as a friend, Miss Holland, but I can assure you that I am one.”
“Thank you,” said Claire gravely. She moved past him. “And good-bye, Mr. Tarleton, I don’t suppose we shall meet again.”
As Claire turned in at the cottage gate, rigidly abstaining from looking back to see what he was doing, Tarleton rammed his hat on his head, swung round on his heel, and started off at a brisk pace to the station, so that the conclusion of his thoughts became involved in the problem of whether he should catch a train and how much time he had to spare.
Tilbury Docks next, and the bustle of an out-going steamer. Claire’s people had come to see her off. Her mother had been so insistent upon that point, it had been impossible to dissuade her. And Denis, rather surprisingly, had decided that it would be quite a good thing. It would disarm suspicion. Claire had not told him of her meeting with Tarleton; she realized that he dreaded suspicion, she knew his whole mind to be a sore and open wound; it was up to her, she felt, to soothe, not to irritate it.
“You can point me out to your people as your new boss,” he said to her. “Tell them I’m deplorably nervous after some great mental strain and couldn’t bear to be introduced. That’s not far from the truth, is it?”
So often he seemed like a child, clinging to her for protection. Claire had kissed him quickly, holding his head against her.
“When we get right away,” she said, “it will be all right, Denis. The strain will lift.”
Already, her first fear forgotten, she was beginning to visualize Africa as a place that, by its very spaciousness, should bring healing to his soul.
So there, amidst all the hurrying crowds, the porters pushing luggage about, shouting directions, stood the entire Holland family seeing Claire off. A little bewildered, a little distressed, more than a little thrilled by all the clamour and excitement.
“There’s Mr. Johnston, Mummy.” Claire pointed Denis out to Mrs. Holland—Johnston was the name they had decided to adopt—“Look, that tall, rather grave-looking man.”
Mrs. Holland, hugging the cakes which she had brought in a paper bag as a farewell gift, stared anxiously after Denis’s figure.
“He looks nice,” she admitted. “Tragic, somehow, and quite elderly. All the same, dear, I wish he had a wife.”
Claire smiled, a funny little wry smile. “It’s all right, Mummy,” she reassured Mrs. Holland, “I’m quite safe.”
She was going to write them, of course from Africa and tell them of her marriage. Dear Mummy and Daddy; if only she could tell them now.
“I feel,” suggested Mr. Holland, diffidently—he gathered it would not meet with his daughter’s approval—“that I ought, perhaps, to say a few words to Mr. Johnston. After all, Claire, you are very young to be leaving us so completely.”
“Daddy, dear, I’m not,” Claire laughed. “Not as girls go nowadays. And, anyway, you can’t. Look, he’s gone already. He told me he was going to push straight on board. He has a horror of crowds and meeting people.”
“He looks topping,” thrust in Gladys. “Oh, Claire, I do wish I were you.”
Mrs. Holland made an odd little movement with her lips. “To bear and nurse and rear then to lose” was the scrap of quotation floating at the back of her mind.
“You’ll go in time, Gladys,” she said. “You are all so eager to go.”
“And eager to come back,” whispered Claire; she gave her mother a quick hug. “I shall be so glad to come back, Mummy.”
Mrs. Holland blinked quick tears from her eyes. Many school partings had taught her that the young hate tears. She pushed the paper bag into Claire’s hands.
“Some cakes I made for you, dear,” she managed to say, with surprising self-possession. “And, Claire look after yourself. You are very precious to us. Good-bye, dear, and God bless you.”
Ah, well! It was good-bye to the old life, to everything dear and familiar and pleasant. Claire wanted to cry too, but that could not be done in the midst of this busy, chattering crowd.
She waved a final good-bye and pushed her way with the rest on to the tug waiting to convey the passengers and hand-baggage out to the great ship where she swung at anchor in mid-stream. On the little deck she found herself standing almost by chance beside Denis. He scarcely seemed to notice her; he was staring intently at the quay. She touched him, half timidly.
“It’s good-bye to England, isn’t it, Denis?” she said. “Are you glad?”
He looked down at her quickly, and back again at the crowd on the quay.
“Look at that great ship that is going to take us right away.”
He swung round at her suggestion; perhaps he had noticed the distaste in her voice.
“Yes, she’s a beauty,” he agreed. He slipped his hand into her arm. “Was it pretty beastly saying good-bye to the people, Claire?”
They were not sharing a cabin; he had booked too late to be able to arrange that. Claire had had to go in with another lady. Denis had a single berth cabin on the promenade deck. Claire found her room-mate already in possession. A little, rotund, cheery person, having about her movements all the brisk certainty of a very important bird. Miss Alice Burke. Claire read the name on the various boxes strewn about the cabin and realized not in the very least what the name would in time come to mean to her. Anyway, Miss Burke was, at least, definite.
“I’m settling in,” she announced, turning a flushed face towards Claire’s entrance, frowning a little with her intense earnestness not to be put upon. “I shan’t be long. Will you mind waiting? And do you mind if I take the lower bunk? I feel I am going to be a bad sailor.”
“Does it matter?” asked Claire. “I mean as to being a bad sailor. I don’t really mind in the least which I have.”
“Thank you,” said Miss Burke with grave precision. “You are Mrs. Johnston, aren’t you? I’m Miss Burke. It’s nice to know each other.”
Claire laughed. “I guessed that was your name,” she acknowledged. “And, yes—mine’s Johnston.”
Miss Burke gave a little suppressed giggle; Claire presumed it was in answer to her own laugh. Afterwards she was to learn that it was Miss Burke’s invariable indication of nervousness.
“Yes, well then, Mrs. Johnston, you won’t mind waiting, will you? and I’ll take the lower berth.”
Claire retreated and found her way up on deck again. The ship was under way by now, the anchor up, the engines throbbing. People, old travellers most of them seemed to be, were already ferreting out their deck chairs and placing them in the best spots. A keen, salt-tanged wind was blowing down the deck, it seemed to bring with it promise of fresh, clean adventure. Claire faced it, walked into it, let it whip her skirts about her, slap some vivid colour into her face, sting her with the wisps of her own hair. She felt invigorated, refreshed, more courageous than she had felt for many a day.
The first-class deck ended there in railings and a drop down to the lower deck and the hold. Claire held on to the railings and let the wind blow all round her, and watched grey-green banks and grey, ugly buildings slip away on either side. It was still the Thames, the Thames she had so loved, only now it was floating, broad and swift and hurrying, out and out to the sea.
Because she had remembered it was the Thames, a sudden memory came to her of that room in Chelsea whose windows opened out on to the river. And memory following memory, as they will without our being sure where we are led, she found herself remembering Madelaine; that night that she had found Madelaine; the way that Death had answered to her gay mockery of life.
“I’ve come to chase the bogies”; she heard her own voice, felt the silence gathering like a wall against her words.
How horrible to remember just that at such a time! This gay, keen wind should blow such memories out of one’s mind!
Distressed, Claire swung round to face the deck and saw Denis’s figure coming towards her.
“I was looking for you,” he said. “I thought perhaps you would be unpacking.”
“Oh no,” Claire laughed, glad to push memory away. “Miss Burke, the lady with whom I share, was very determined about that. She is going to unpack first.”
He stood looking down at her. “How young you look, all blown about with the wind,” he whispered. “How absolutely beautiful!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Yet her heart, starved for some time, answered to the glow in his words. “One doesn’t pay compliments to one’s wife, Denis. Do you know when Miss Burke called me ‘Mrs. Johnston’ just now, I realized with a shock I really am married.”
The meaning he might attach to her words flushed her cheeks; she turned away.
“Let’s find our chairs,” she suggested. “Choose a good spot, Denis. We have such heaps to talk over.”
Later on, she lay that same night in the cabin, dutifully ensconced in the top bunk, watching Miss Burke getting ready for bed. It was still surprisingly calm, the great ship was moving with stately precision. The wind had dropped. The cliffs of Dover had slipped out of sight. They were heading now for the Bay of Biscay, but as yet its waves were not living up to their evil reputation.
It had not taken long for Claire to get into bed. There was a decidedly old-fashioned tang about Miss Burke’s operations. For one thing, she had long hair that needed a lot of brushing, that was plaited finally into two decorously long plaits.
“I don’t like new fangled things,” she told Claire. She was amazingly full of conversation, Miss Burke. You realized her as a person who had, perhaps, never had her full share of talk. Socially it was suppressed within her; it bubbled forth when she found herself alone with a listener.
“Bobbed hair,” she explained, “though yours suits you, and face cream instead of soap and water. I’ve always washed my face with soap.”
“It’s supposed to spoil one’s complexion,” suggested Claire, only mildly interested.
“Bosh!” said Miss Burke. She divested herself of her day garments underneath the covering shield of an austerely-cut night-gown. “And pyjamas—I see you wear them. Why do women have such a fancy for trousers? In Africa, do you know, they wear them day and night?”
“You’ve been in Africa?” asked Claire. “Shall I like it do you think?”
“That depends. One has to be broad-minded out there,” conceded Miss Burke. “This is my second visit, and I’m certainly more broad-minded than I was.”
She sat on the edge of the sofa-bunk under the porthole and peeped up at Claire. Privately she thought Claire’s night attire rather outrageous, but she had to admit it was attractive. “But I still think women look best in skirts,” she concluded, answering her own thoughts.
Claire smiled. “I’m sorry about my pyjamas,” she said. “Do you just go out to Africa on visits, or is your home out there?”
“My home! Good gracious no!” said Miss Burke. “I went out two years ago on a visit and I enjoyed it so much that I’m going back again.”
“It’s awfully sporting of you,” said Claire. “These voyages all alone must be very trying.”
“I like them,” announced Miss Burke. “I’m incurably adventurous.” Claire wondered vaguely what she might mean. Spinster from choice was so undeniably written all over Miss Burke.
“You must tell me about it tomorrow,” she begged. “Only I am so gloriously sleepy, aren’t you? The sea lapping against the side of the ship is singing a lullaby.”
“Humph,” grunted Miss Burke. “I hope neither of us will be sick in the night. These cabins are horrible if one is.”
An unromantic thought to fall asleep on. It was difficult to credit Miss Burke with romance. On the borderland of sleep, Claire smiled, calling up a vision of her cabin companion, her face well washed with soap, conversing with a crowd of spirits. And then she fell asleep and her dreams carried her away back to England and the room of her little flat with Jack standing in front of her, looking at her with hurt, hard eyes.
Jack came back to a London devoid of interest to him, and a life which he found almost unbearably desolate. He was a young man, who, once taken with the fever of love, was bound to suffer it pretty badly.
With a great bitterness creeping into his heart Jack went back to his rooms and found the letter she had written to him, stuck up with others on the mantelpiece. She had put “To wait arrival” on it. She had been in no hurry for him to get it. The letter told him what all those weeks he had been fighting against having to believe. Claire was married to Mr. Tremayne; they were going abroad. It was dated six weeks back; they had been gone then for six weeks.
Jack crumpled the letter up in his hands and threw it into the fire. His landlady had lit one for him, just as she said, “to air the room, sir, and make it more homely”. Homely! The bitterness of that struck Jack as he watched the flames catch at and curl round Claire’s letter.
Well, that was finished; it remained to make what one could of life. One thing was certain: London and the old ways, the old days’ work was out of the question. He must chuck his hand in and try for something else, something that would take him right out and away.
The mission that Tarleton had sent him out on had failed. He had followed the mysterious Mr. Wargrave from Italy to America and back again to Paris, and in Paris all traces of him had disappeared.
It was at this stage that his landlady came into the room and announced that Mr. Tarleton wanted to speak to him on the ’phone.
“Well, kid,” the well-known voice drawled through the ’phone. “You drew a snag?”
“I did,” Jack admitted. He would be brief with his words. Explanations and excuses were always wasted on Tarleton.
He heard the other man chuckle. “As a matter of fact,” Tarleton said, “our man has been found. Don’t know who you were chasing all over the world; this poor devil found a damp bed about two months ago under some old barges in the Thames.”
“Good lord!” said Jack. “You don’t mean——”
“Buzz round and I’ll put you wise,” said Tarleton’s voice. “I’ve one or two things to tell you.”
Tarleton’s old room again! The haze of tobacco smoke, the well-known keen and alert figure!
Tarleton, glancing at him, drew his own conclusions and came to a sudden resolve. The boy had evidently been badly hit.
“Well, my son,” he said cheerfully, “you come back to find more than one bird flown, eh? I warned you against falling in love, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” agreed Jack. “It’s beyond the point, though, isn’t it? Tell me what’s turned up over the Tremayne murder.”
“Well, for one thing,” Tarleton sucked at his pipe, “the Wargrave scent was a false one. You’ve found that out. And anyway, he didn’t do the murder. I’ve proved that to my satisfaction.”
“Have you proved anything else?” asked Jack. “And how did the poor devil come into the water, suicide or murder?”
“Or a step in the dark when he was drunk? Who is to prove what he did?” snorted Tarleton. “The body had been in the water two months when it was found. That long-limbed ass Nathaniel, still havering about motives, identified the clothes. There were some sodden papers that are of no particular value in one of the pockets. But no—he didn’t do the murder.”
“Have you any idea——” began Jack. Tarleton waved him to silence.
“I’m full of ideas my dear chap, but it is obvious to me that you’ve lost interest in the case and I’m not going to impart them.”
“I’m sorry,” admitted Jack, “but it’s damnably true. I’ve lost interest in everything. Look here, Tarleton, you’ve been an absolute brick to me; don’t think me ungrateful. I’m sick of myself to the back teeth, but I’ve simply got to quit.”
Tarleton nodded. His eyes narrowed to a kindly scrutiny. “I reckon,” he said, “that the war didn’t leave you fellows with much grit to stand up against things. Now don’t get rattled. I meant emotional things. You strained your nerves once, good and great; the noise, the stench, the loathsomeness of death. It doesn’t show you any less a man because your nerves now are apt to play false.” He considered a moment, staring at his pipe. “Love,” he concluded, “always plays the devil with one’s nerves.”
“Oh, leave that out,” said Jack fiercely, “it’s finished. You may be right about the emotional stamina. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that I’ve got to get away.”
“Thought of where you are going?” asked Tarleton.
Jack shook his head. “Away from London, from England, if I can. A life that will take me out of doors.”
A sudden thought came to Tarleton. He blinked his eyes over it. Heaven knows it was not his usual role, this of playing elderly Cupid to a young man’s stricken heart, but it was just possible something might come out of it.
“What about Africa?” he suggested.
“It would do as well as anywhere else,” Jack agreed morosely. For a second he thought of asking Tarleton if he knew where the Tremaynes had gone, but on the facts the question was absurd.
Tarleton had risen and was tapping out his pipe.
“I know,” he said; “the Commissioner of Police in Kenya might get you a job.”
“It’s not the same thing as here, Lord bless you,” he laughed. “Policemen in those foreign parts are more like tin soldiers than anything else. I should think it’s a good enough life, fathering black fellows in khaki uniform.” He spun round to look quizzically at Jack. “There’s no detective work about it. You’ll make a very handsome figure in the police uniform they sport out there.”
He proved, anyway, as good as his word. Certain formalities set aside, the whole thing was settled with surprising swiftness. Jack found himself being interviewed by several departments, medically examined and put through his paces, and finally heard that he had been appointed an officer of the Kenya Police Force. There was uniform to be bought after that, kit to be selected, books to be dipped into, books that set forth the queer, unintelligible language which it behoved an officer of native police to master as soon as possible, and then his passage to be procured, the date of sailing fixed.
He dined with Tarleton his last night in London. It was nine months now since the Tremayne murder; it was as well forgotten as most murders are in that length of time. The two men dined together in the grill-room of the Trocadero, a place of infinite noise. Some perversity in Tarleton, for he was no lover of music, caused him always to select the table under the band on these rare occasions when he dined out. He and Jack had to shout their remarks to each other, and it was in one of those yelled fragments of conversation that Tarleton electrified Jack by announcing that he had in his hand the last knot of the Tremayne puzzle.
“What on earth do you mean?” asked Jack. The band at this point clashed itself into one of its brief silences. “You know who did it?”
Tarleton nodded. “I know,” he admitted. “I’ve known for some time. Only . . .” he shrugged purposely annoying shoulders.
Jack knew himself to be galvanized into curiosity over a thing which he had sworn should have no further interest for him.
“You could put your hand on the man?” he asked, leaning forward.
“I could put my hand on the man,” Tarleton agreed. “Only—is it worth it? The woman has been dead nine months and no one much the worse for it. I often think we are too fussy about murders, and I hate hangings!”
The bandmaster had risen again. He was conducting his troupe by a few mysterious waves of his wand into a perfect fury of sound.
“Oh, don’t be absurd,” shouted Jack against the opening bars. “You can’t let justice down like that. If you can prove it against him he’s got to hang.”
“Yes, I suppose he has got to,” admitted Tarleton. “There’s always justice, as you say. Must dash home and get down to it. Good-bye, kid, and good luck.”
“Yes, but hang it all, Tarleton,” remonstrated Jack. “About this Tremayne case, my only one, I can’t help wanting to know.”
He moved towards the door. “You’ll see it in the papers,” he said, “if anything comes out.” He was gone then without even another good-bye. The swing door shutting behind him seemed to close on that chapter in Jack’s life. His time in London, his career in the police, his love for Claire. There was Africa and the future to face. And after all the Tremayne case was a part of the past. Why had he been so absurdly eager to hear about it?
Miss Burke had been very ill for three days and her powers of conversation had been limited. She was blossoming forth now with renewed vigour. Today she had ventured on deck, and she had found the outside air wonderfully invigorating. Little white-tipped waves made the movement of the sea almost beautiful. Away in the distance you could see the faint white and green land of Spain.
Claire had been very good to Miss Burke during the latter’s indisposition. Quite often she had tip-toed into the cabin to see if there was anything she could do, and always Miss Burke had greeted her with a wan smile and a wave of the hand. It had been a pathetic picture: Miss Burke, supine and silent, her plaits a little ruffled, her face—Claire did not wish to be uncharitable, but she guessed that Miss Burke’s face was going without soap.
Claire had not minded the sea at all. She had even enjoyed it. She loved the wind, the race of the waves, the way she swayed her body and laughed and caught at whatever was handy when the boat lurched. Denis had been much more cheerful, too, more like his old self. He had made friends with two people on board; they shared a table in the saloon, had cheery little bridge parties in the evening, strolled about the decks together. One of them was going out to East Africa, too, to start farming. Denis found such heaps to talk to him about. Claire herself liked best of all the cheery Irishman, who had joined their party. Captain Frinton, he was the Government; the other man chipped him about that. He was a police officer.
“The sort of person who sees you put a number up on your motor,” Rawlinson, their fellow planter, chaffed.
Frinton grinned good humouredly. Claire like him very much. You could not imagine his being put out or cross about anything.
“They are jealous, Mrs. Johnston,” he assured her. “Poor devils. After all, life is very precarious for them sowing maize and what not. It makes their mouths water to see us fellows with our settled incomes, our free houses and doctors.”
Very fond of the ladies, Frinton. Always hovering round Claire with his compliments, all pat, his blue eyes, very honest in their admiration. But he was interesting, too—he knew and loved the country they were bound for; he spoke warmly of his native police, the people as a whole. Denis did not like him very much. Claire had tried to find out why. It could not be that Denis was jealous; Captain Frinton made exactly the same speeches to all the ladies. If one listened, one would be sure to hear him making love to someone on deck. He had been talking to Claire that morning, hence the vacant chair. Denis had got up and strolled away; he would not come back till he was quite sure Frinton was not there.
So Claire had smiled a warm welcome to Miss Burke.
“Come and sit down,” she had said. “I’m so glad you are up.”
Miss Burke sat down. She was looking very neat and defiant.
Frinton had strolled up to them and paused, seeing another lady as yet unknown.
“Can I get you a drink, Mrs. Johnston?” he asked.
Claire shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “Pull up a chair, Captain Frinton; sit down. This is Miss Burke.”
Claire got up, giving her skirts a little shake, setting her hair into sleekness.
“There’s Denis,” she said. “I expect he is waiting for his morning’s walk. Au revoir, you two.” She was gone with her lithe, quick step, and Frinton gazing after her gave a heartfelt sigh.
“A charming, very beautiful girl,” he said. “Married to a man with a past. I always meet them too late.”
Miss Burke’s eyes were also following Claire. When she spoke her voice had a curious note of fear in it.
“Is that man,” she asked, “there, the one she is speaking to, her husband?”
“Yes,” admitted Frinton. He glanced up at her curiously.
All of them went ashore at Port Said. Claire and Denis, Miss Burke, Rawlinson, and Captain Frinton. Miss Burke got lost. It was the sort of thing she was quite capable of doing, despite her brisk efficiency.
Denis was inclined to be annoyed. Why on earth had the woman tacked herself on to him and then gone and got lost? Miss Burke was not one of the people that Denis liked. She had so attached herself to Claire that it was sometimes quite difficult to get his wife alone.
“I vote we leave her,” he decided. “She’s not the kind of female any Arab would kidnap. She’ll find her way back.”
“Oh, Denis, how could we?” remonstrated Claire.
In the end they decided that Denis and Rawlinson should go on to the restaurant where they meant to have supper and keep a table, Claire and Captain Frinton would just go back along the principal streets and into Simon Artz.
“But you aren’t to drag the wife all over the place,” was Denis’s final instruction. “If that ridiculous female is not at Simon Artz, leave her to her fate and join us.”
They promised, laughing, and strolled back along the crowded busy street. Insistent street vendors clamoured for their attention, polite Arab and Indian shop owners urged them to just come in and look round. The very air throbbed with noise and heat and colour.
“You won’t find anything like this in Africa,” Captain Frinton told Claire. “Mombasa tries to copy an Indian bazaar, but it’s a pale effort. There is something about Africa different to anything else in the world, but its wonder doesn’t lie in its people or in its old, dead civilization. There’s never been any human life in Africa worth talking about. Her people have always been puny, insignificant atoms pitted against merciless forces of nature.”
“That sounds terrifying,” admitted Claire. “Do you know when Denis first brought home a map and showed me our place right out in the blue with just a silly, little meandering of black, linking us up with some unknown spot called Eldoret, I did feel frightened—miserably so.”
He glanced at her quickly. He had got to know her very well during the fortnight’s companionship on the sea; he had come to know her husband not at all. Johnston surrounded himself with a chill barrier of reserve—yet Frinton was no mean judge of character for all his fooling, and, quite apart from Miss Burke’s queerness, he had sensed something strange behind Johnston’s reserve. There had been times when he had thought to himself, “That man is afraid.” Did this girl, walking beside him, so charmingly alive to everything that occurred round her, so quick to answer to even a stranger’s moods, did she realize anything of the tragedy that might be haunting her, and—realizing it—was that what had taught her fear?
“Look here, Mrs. Johnston.” He spoke quickly on impulse. “Away out there in the blue, as you say, if you ever need a friend will you remember me? I’m stationed in the nearest police post to Eldoret, that’s not so very far away.”
“You sound serious,” laughed Claire. “Mine was only a ridiculous fear, lasting for a moment. A fear of great open spaces. I love crowds.”
“It’s bound to be pretty lonely,” he admitted. “It must be a big test to marriage—I’ve always thought that—you will be thrown very much on each other.”
“Yes.”
He thought an odd wistfulness held her voice; she certainly turned very deliberately from the subject.
“But I’ll remember you are within hail,” she added gaily. “You and Miss Burke. She insists upon coming to stay with me.”
“I’m glad,” he announced. “She’s a good sort, Miss Burke. Even today she has lost herself and given us this delightful walk together.”
They turned in at Simon Artz and walked up and down between the many counters, searching for the little defiant lady without success.
“What are we to do?” asked Claire. “I can’t just leave her as Denis suggests, and he’ll get so cross.”
“I’ve one further idea,” said Frinton. “She may have been lured into a gambling hell. She is perilously keen to see life. Miss Burke, have you noticed that? There’s a place over the way that lays itself out for pigeons in a mild way, and cloaks its doings with an air of such perfect respectability that I feel sure it would appeal to Miss Burke.”
They made their way across the street, and assisted by a very eloquent guide found their way into one of the houses and up some steep, narrow stairs. The door at the top opened on to a low room, whose entire length was occupied by a gaming-table, round which were grouped several passengers from the boat. Among them, to justify Captain Frinton’s prophecy, was Miss Burke. She looked hot and worried and distinctly obstinate, her mild brows gathered in the formidable frown they occasionally adopted. She tackled Captain Frinton at once.
“I have lost ten francs,” she announced. “And I don’t think it has been fairly won. But that black man at the top of the table quite refuses to listen to me.”
“He would,” acknowledge Frinton. “Most people come here because they want to lose money.”
“And, Alice, we’ve been looking for you everywhere,” put in Claire. “What happened to you?”
“You left me,” said Miss Burke. “I am not going to lose any more here. We might as well go away. Unless you want to play, that’s to say.”
“Not on your life,” chuckled Frinton. “This isn’t my first trip East.”
“Nor mine,” Miss Burke stated primly. “Only I must confess I like to see what I can on my journeys. You left me,” she continued explaining to Claire. “I thought it a little odd.”
“We didn’t really,” said Claire. “I was looking at some shawls and Denis called out, ‘Hurry up, we’re all waiting’, and when I joined them outside you weren’t there.”
Miss Burke grunted; at least it was a noise very like that. She had formed a very deep-rooted dislike for Mr. Johnston, which she did not always find easy to conceal.
“Mr. Johnston’s remarks about you have been crisp and to the point,” said Frinton. “But for me, I owe you a vote of thanks.”
“What for?” asked Miss Burke suspiciously. “Losing myself?”
“Not that exactly,” laughed Frinton. “But for giving me three quarters of an hour of Mrs. Johnston’s undivided company.”
“I suppose you’ll say you have been looking for me,” said Miss Burke. “You are an incorrigible creature, and that is a fact.”
They had supper at one of the crowded street restaurants, popular in Port Said. The tables encroached right out on to the pavements, crowds walked round them; eager merchants, fortune tellers and conjurers gathered round them.
“Let me tell your fortune, lady—you have the lucky face!”
“Postcards! Would not the gentleman like postcards?”
“We’d have our hands full in the East doing that,” sighed Captain Frinton. “Wouldn’t you like your fortune told, Miss Burke? This man here says you have got a lucky face.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t let’s have fortune tellers,” snapped Denis. “We’ll have no peace if you encourage one of them.”
Miss Burke looked up at him, prepared to argue the point. She was always thrusting arguments forward against Mr. Johnston; it was her one method of voicing her disapproval. The words, however, died on her lips. She was conscious of a sudden sense of fear. The woman in black was standing very close behind Johnston, but it was Claire that she was watching, and there was something intensely horrible in her fierce brooding eyes. Miss Burke made a little sound; she could not help it, and at that the fortune teller who had been standing fawning at her elbow, leant forward and stooped and put his black face close to her ear.
“There is danger for the white woman whom your heart loves,” he whispered in quite good English. “You, too, have the eyes that can see.”
He straightened himself, made some curious sign with crossed fingers, and slithered away among the crowd.
“Now what,” said Frinton, with amused eyes on Miss Burke’s flushed and agitated countenance, “did the man have to say to you, Miss Burke? Some of these blighters are dreadfully improper at times.”
With the laugh against her, Miss Burke rose and thrust herself between Claire and that uncanny, watching figure.
“Isn’t it time we went back?” she said. “Let’s leave the men to settle up, Mrs. Johnston. I just want one thing more at Simon Artz.”
This sense of fear whenever she thought of Mrs. Johnston in connection with Mr. Johnston, became a positive obsession with Miss Burke. It had really nothing to do with her, only she was one of those lonely, on-their-own women, endowed by Fate with an enormous capacity for devotion. Rich stores of love lay concealed within Miss Burke’s brisk and business-like exterior. She was a person who should have had many home ties, and she had very few. She would have made a willing, life-long martyr on the altar of any family hearth, and in reality there was no one who required her services. She was too well endowed with this world’s goods to be able to attach herself as the humble paid slave to other people’s children, or peevish old people, so she wandered about the world, lavishing all her heart’s interests on the people she might be thrown with. Absorbing her self in their interests, laughing with their laughter, torturing her heart with their tears. And each new interest as it came, was the all-absorbing one of the moment.
She loved Claire, and that in no light and passing fashion. As far as Claire was concerned, Frinton quite understood the attraction. Claire was a person anyone could get very fond of, if they let themselves go. There was something very appealing about her gold-tinted head, the curve of her lashes, the soft lines of her lips and chin.
Personally he had not allowed himself to fall in love with her. Had he done that, he quite realized, phrased in his own language, that it would be a case of plunging off the deep end. And after all, he had plunged too often in his own life not to realize by now that in nine cases out of ten it is the woman who pays for the thrill. There was that about Claire, a certain brave frankness that made one want to smooth life’s pathway for her as much as possible. Falling in love with a married woman, though it may be complimentary to her charms, hardly achieves smoothness for her travelling feet.
Frinton had had all this out with himself, and by sheer common sense had worked himself into a position of almost fatherly affection. He was for one thing a great deal older, forty-five to Claire’s twenty-three, and then it had never seemed to occur to her that he might dream of love.
But, liking her, he was well aware that she must be in need of friends. The length of the voyage had brought him no nearer to understanding Johnston. Johnston was desperately jealous of his wife.
Claire had told Frinton about the marriage, its secrecy, its speed. “There were reasons,” she said; “Denis couldn’t tell people.”
Her voice had sounded shadowed with some anxiety. He had surmised a scandal in the man’s life; he could not vision scandal as touching Claire.
“I’m going to tell Mummy about it from Mombasa,” she added. “She thinks I’m still Miss Holland.”
“It’s a big step to have taken, isn’t it?” Frinton asked. “Without your people knowing anything about it.”
“I couldn’t tell them,” she acknowledged. “And then, you see, I really am my own caretaker. I’ve been that for several years.” She looked at him, laughing a little. “Don’t you credit me with having been a bachelor girl in London?” she asked.
“I’m old-fashioned,” he answered grimly. “I hate to think of girls like yourself out on their own, earning their living. It’s like catching sparrows and harnessing them to ploughs.”
“Ah, but we’re not sparrows,” Claire said. “We are very hardy. You don’t know how well able we are to ‘plough a lonely furrow’.”
Frinton gave up the argument. She should not have been allowed out on her own, he was quite sure of that.
Given all his own suspicions on this head, he was yet surprised at the vigour of Miss Burke’s distrust.
“After all, we don’t know anything against the man,” Frinton argued. “He is a gentleman and he’s got money, and, presumably, she had found something to like and trust in him. One has got to take that into account.”
“There is some hideous secret behind him,” stated Miss Burke vehemently, all her placid features called into duty for the frown. “I have invited myself to stay with them. She has got to be protected.”
“What against?” Frinton queried. “Though I am glad enough you are going to stay. She’s bound to find life very lonely.”
Miss Burke beat almost frantic hands against the rail. The ship was steaming slowly into Killindini Harbour, the end of their journey. Most of the passengers were ranged along the decks staring at the palm trees, the tropical growth of green, the glimpsed-at white houses.
“He won’t let me go, to begin with,” Miss Burke’s agitated voice went on. “Of course, she tries to explain it politely. The house isn’t ready, they’ve to get things ship-shape, and so on.”
“Well, that’s only sensible,” argued Frinton. “After all, they’ve only recently married, Miss Burke.”
She gave him a quick, scornful stare. “You don’t understand,” she affirmed. “How can I make you understand? He won’t let me come if he can help it, and anything may happen to her shut away from other people with him.”
“Oh, come now,” laughed Frinton. “Aren’t you exaggerating?”
She stared beyond him, her queer eyes dilated, her mouth set in obstinate lines. “I don’t know,” she whispered, “but I’m afraid, horribly afraid.”
“Well, I’m not so very far off,” Frinton humoured her. “Look here, Miss Burke, give me your address. I’ll buzz over in my car in about a month’s time and report progress.”
“You’ll do that”; she woke to sudden eagerness. “I know you like her—if you could only realize her need. Stick by her.”
“To the end of my life I shall always be prepared to do my damnedest for Mrs. Johnston,” he assured her gravely. “You can be quite certain of that.”
Miss Burke had to rest satisfied with his assurance. She was quite right in saying that Denis would not have her. The journey over, he was desperately keen on achieving the purpose for which it had been accomplished. Complete solitude for himself and Claire. Let the silence of great spaces close round him, shutting out memories and visions and fears.
He was restlessly impatient of their stay in Nairobi where they had to put in four weeks waiting for their car to be cleaned, buying furniture and curtains and crockery for their house. Engaging a staff of boys. Frinton helped them over that. Frinton was too eager to help, stayed too much in evidence. Denis watched him with sombre eyes; was vastly relieved when the call of duty forced him to pack up and depart a week earlier than they did. Miss Burke had already gone straight up-country to the people with whom she had come out to stay. Rawlinson had hurried off eagerly to his farm. Denis was glad they had all gone. He said as much to Claire.
“We should have kept more to ourselves on board,” he said. “It was a mistake to get mixed up with friends.”
“Oh, why?” said Claire. She stood brushing her hair in front of the glass in the hotel bedroom. They shared a room now; marriage had definitely closed in on Claire. Denis’s passion was all-absorbing, a little terrifying. She knew now, as she had never realized before, that she could not, had never loved, Denis. She dared not think of Jack. Her friendship with Frinton, even the gay companionship of Rawlinson and Alice’s rather absurd devotion, had seemed sane and happy compared with these other bewildered sensations. She would have like to cling to them; Denis was intent on sweeping them away.
“We don’t need other people,” he said now. He was close to her, in a minute he would catch her in his arms, hold her against him, kiss kisses from her lips. “We have each other,” he whispered. “Do we want anyone else?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered faintly. “Friends, one always wants friends, Denis.” It was almost a little cry of fear as his hands touched her. “Sometimes your love terrifies me.”
He stood away at once, his face set into sudden cold lines. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t love me? That would be damnably funny.”
Claire put the brush down and turned to face him with flaming cheeks, “Denis,” she said, “is it fair to talk to me like that? Have I failed in any way? When you speak to me like that—look at me like that—is it any wonder that I’m frightened. Oh——” Sudden tears shook her; she ran and flung herself down on the bed, hiding her face.
“Don’t, Claire, don’t,” he implored. “Dear heart, you don’t know. I’m not all sane. I’ve been through so much loving you, thinking I was going to lose you. Ah, Claire, don’t cry like this—it tears at my heart.”
She turned quickly, rubbing a wet cheek against his. No one ever appealed to Claire for sympathy in vain.
“I’m sorry, Denis.” She choked back quick sobs. “I’m being a silly idiot. Only I have been feeling so—so homesick all today. Look, I’ve finished.” She sat upon the edge of the bed, mopping her eyes with an inadequate handkerchief. “Doesn’t one look awful when one cries?”
“Don’t worry, Claire. I’ll come back in a minute to see if you are ready to go out.”
On that he had gone, shutting the door behind him, leaving her to her agitation and her remorse. She had never supposed a man could cry! The immensity of his emotion shook her; she could not forgive herself for the hurt her stupidity had caused.
He suggested a drive that evening after dinner. The Dodge had been handed over to them; he wanted, he said, to try it. They were going to drive in two days’ time from thence onwards to their destination, taking with them Yonosani, the English-speaking boy whom Frinton had been able to procure. Yonosani would be useful to them in so many ways and he knew the route, at any rate, as far as Eldoret. The other boys and the bulk of their luggage had gone on ahead; they should be waiting for them at Eldoret.
Yonosani was a queer-looking, elderly native, who affected European clothes; but he was very reliable, Frinton had said. Already he was valeting Denis with extreme care, brushing and folding his clothes into weird shapes, choosing his ties and handkerchiefs to match. He watched everything that Denis did so that he should know exactly how the master liked things.
He watched them get into the car that evening and ran upstairs and fetched a cloak for Claire.
“The mem-sahib will be cold,” he said in his stiff English. “Nairobi is plenty bad for colds.”
Claire laughed at that. She sat close to Denis as the car hummed along, and tried to tell in halting, frank words the reason of her stupidity that morning. But Denis did not want to talk about it; it did not take her long to realize that. He wanted to forget he had been hurt. He talked about the car, and how she ran, and how much petrol she would use, and whether she was getting enough oil.
When they got back to the hotel he helped her out and let his hand linger on hers. There was no one about; they had the front steps of the hotel to themselves.
“Good night, Claire,” he said very gravely. “I’ll run the car round to the garage and then—I’ve taken another room for tonight. Poor child, you shall have a little peace. I have been terribly thoughtless—I realize that now.”
She stared up at him. “Oh, but Denis,” she began.
He raised the hand still in his to his lips with a certain brusqueness. “Please,” he whispered, “leave it as I’ve arranged it, Claire.”
She could not argue against that. She moved on into the hotel and heard him drive the car away. She felt hurt and dismayed, yet behind the other feeling there was a vague sense of relief. The night would be her own again. The intimacy of married life had seemed to her strangely embarrassing. She must not let him stay shut away like this though; she decided that just as sleep swayed down on her. It would never do. He would think—there were so many things he must not be allowed to think.
Apparently, however, Denis was determined to keep aloof. The evenings found him entrenched behind a barrier of stiffness, and tongue-tied by shyness; Claire stayed outside. Two days later they started on their drive to Nakuru, swept onwards from there up to Eldoret, left Eldoret and rolled along the little track that Claire had first seen traced across the map that Denis had shown her. Now, loneliness definitely shut them in, solitude stretched on all sides of them. Nakuru had been a town of tin houses and infinite dust, crowds of Europeans, motor-cars of all sorts.
A big settler community dwelt on its outskirts, flooded its hotels and clubs. From Nakuru the road had wound up and up, with farms on either side, through miles of cultivation, up and up to the plateau plain of Eldoret. Amazingly, bewilderingly beautiful this stretch of road, passing at its heights through fairy forests of bamboo, sweeping out on to unexpected wide vistas of rolling green, merging at last into the grass track that crosses the great plains. And then Eldoret. A Dutch dorp almost, straggling, scattered houses, opulent-looking shops. The railhead this—a brand new station testifying to the recent arrival of commerce’s most trusty slave.
Denis and Claire found their luggage waiting, dumped by the side of the station, their staff of boys in charge. A friendly, white station-master put them wise as to the best method of having it transported.
“You are going out to Graham’s place, aren’t you?” he asked. “That’s right. He left a month back. Told me he had sold it. Get a couple of vans from Brewster—it’s not too bad a track out to your place. He’ll take the things out for you.”
Nothing was done with any great speed in this amazing new country. They had learnt that on their way up. Brewster and his vans, ramshackled affairs, largely tied together by string, got under way rather late on the afternoon of the next day. He reckoned they’d hit Graham’s late place some time before ten, spend the night, and start back the next morning.
“We ought to offer you dinner and a bed,” Claire suggested. One did not at home offer to feed and put up the furniture remover; she felt a little lost.
“Oh, that will be all right,” Brewster engulfed her modest suggestion. “I daresay your boys when they’ve fallen off the vans will rake up something. Anyway, we shall all be in the same box, shan’t we?”
If he meant they would all be equally uncomfortable, he was not far wrong. Claire never forgot the misery of that home-coming.
Ndogo! That was the name of their new place. The name, Claire supposed, of the bleak, grey house, set in a wilderness of garden, whose flowers had all been killed by quick-sprouting weeds, whose paths were no longer visible under the grass that grew everywhere. Mr. Graham had apparently given up the struggle sometime before he went home. The whole place showed pitiful signs of neglect, the stacked empty whisky bottles just beyond reach of the back verandah pointed to the reason of his failure. Cases of whisky and golf clubs, someone had sarcastically said, are the only necessary imports into Kenya. In this wilderness there was not even golf.
Both Denis and Claire were appalled by the task in front of them. There appeared to be no labour obtainable. Bwana Graham had been a bad bwana; the whisky had made him dangerous. There were no native settlers on his land; there was no sign of native life for miles round. With the four house boys and Yonosani a certain amount of comfort and tidiness was imparted to the house and nearby garden. But beyond the reach of their activities stretched the miles and miles of what ought to have been maize land, nothing now but a vast track of high grass and weeds.
A fierce moroseness descended upon Denis in the face of this desolation. Perhaps he felt it to be but another sign of the forces working against him. What he touched, withered; the things he looked on, died.
There was the house to be set to rights; that at least was woman’s work, and she threw herself into it with zest. It was amazing how order and daintiness and charm grew out of chaos, and, if at times she was vaguely conscious of the fact that the prettiness of the house served only to hide some grim starkness of unpleasant truth, she very pluckily shut her mind to the thought. The thought persisted, though, as thoughts will, and it was Yonosani who one day, quite unwittingly, dragged it into the light of accepted things.
Yonosani had been invaluable. He had been a Trojan for work, his quaint English had tided over many difficulties in Claire’s housekeeping. Brought into contact with his faithful watching eyes, she was pleasantly aware of the fact that there was a soul whom she could rely on in any emergency.
During those perilously difficult days Claire came to feel that she loved old Yonosani as she had never dreamt it to be likely that she would like a native. And in the silent, uncanny war which she was about to wage, he stood shoulder to shoulder with her and fought his best.
It was Yonosani, therefore, who came to her one morning, standing just within the doorway of the pleasant drawing-room which she had conjured into being out of the grimness of the house. Claire had been writing mail letters. They had been three months in residence now at Ndogo. Three months! Her letters from Mombasa announcing her marriage had gone home—the answer to them lay now on the table in front of her.
Poor fluttered Mrs. Holland’s, all full of dashes and exclamations, splashed in more than one spot with what had been obviously tears:
So long as you are happy, dear! He seemed, to look nice, but oh, so tragic, we thought! You are very young, Claire, to have to fight against tragedy!
Claire, reading, could have cried herself, so obviously had a hurt been dealt, so bravely did Mrs. Holland endeavour to excuse and defend.
She looked up from the letter to see Yonosani standing in the doorway. His old face wore a puzzled expression, his eyes seemed to ask pardon for the thing he was about to say.
“Mem-sahib,” he began, and hesitated and then fluttered into speech with a queer movement of his hands. “Memsahib, there is another white woman in this house.”
His eyes brought gravity to bear on his statement. Claire turned more fully to look at him.
“What do you mean, Yonosani?” she asked.
He glanced before he answered over his shoulder. “I have seen her many times,” he affirmed. “Mem-sahib,” he came a little further into the room, “it is not right. There is evil in this house. It were better to go away.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Yonosani,” said Claire. “What are you talking about?”
“I do not know,” he admitted. “It is outside my knowledge. But she is there, for I have seen her.”
Claire stood up. “Here, now?” she asked. “Where did she come from Yonosani? Have you left her on the verandah?”
Yonosani’s eyes grew more pleading in his endeavour to make himself understood.
“Have I not said it is outside my knowledge?” he asked. “Should I say that if it were but another mem-sahib waiting on the verandah?”
“But then,” Claire began; she felt, not unreasonably, a little chill of fear, and grew quite angry because of it. “Please try and explain what you mean, Yonosani,” she said haughtily. “Or I shall call the master.”
“He knows the white woman is here,” stated Yonosani. “I have seen him see her. Because of you the master is afraid.”
Claire sat down quickly on the first chair available. “Look here, Yonosani,” she said, “you are talking sheer rubbish. Have you been drinking?”
He shook a patient head; his eyes never wavered from hers. “No, mem-sahib,” he answered. “I speak but the truth.”
Claire took a deep breath and faced the fear in her heart.
He moved to the door. “Shall I bring lunch, memsahib?” he asked.
“When the master comes in,” Claire ordered.
When Yonosani had left the room she crossed over to the window, and standing a little behind the gay chintz curtain, she stared out into the sunshine. Denis was out there; she could see him at the bottom of the path. He had been clearing away some of the weeds. He never seemed to feel the sun; he worked at all hours in the garden. Claire rarely saw him choose a shady spot for his labours.
Claire found herself holding on to the curtain, peering back into the room. It was a cheerful, light-filled place. No shadows there; gay-hued chintzes, soft cushions, familiar pictures. Even her little guardian angel perched on the writing-table watching her with grave eyes.
Her eyes fell on her letters—a sudden thought came to her. “I’ll write Alice,” she decided. “Perhaps she’ll be able to help.”
It was a stiffly-worded epistle, yet perhaps more than she realized her stark fear peeped out from between the words. The writing of it brought some sense of comfort, the idea of help at hand. Claire could greet Denis with a smile, slip her hand into his as they went in to lunch. If that waiting shadow lurked and watched, let it see at least that her courage was going to stand round Denis like a shield.
Denis had stayed away from her since that scene at the hotel in Nairobi; he had had a room made for himself at the opposite end of the verandah to hers. Thinking things out, with fear now bravely acknowledged, Claire realized that in letting their relations slip into this phase she had been wrong. Selfishly wrong, for, if shyness had kept her quiescent, under his arrangements there had also been a certain amount of contentment that things should be as they were. But it had been wrong to let him stay away and brood and imagine and fear. Looked at from the light of common sense, her presence, her love, would do more to rout it than anything else.
She had not love to give; for the moment Claire forgot that. Women are inclined to forget that man’s love for the body goes further than just that, and hankers after the soul. It was in this fallacy that Claire erred, and because of it she brought tragedy hurtling about her ears.
She waited to fulfil her mission till the house was shut up and Yonosani and the rest of the boys gone away for the night. They lived in separate little huts at some distance from the house. There was a full moon tonight; it lit up the outside world to almost the brightness of day with something cold and sinister about its shadows.
There was no silence, the moon seemed to have called into being all kinds of animal and insect life. Claire noticed, on her way down the verandah, that the frogs were noisier than she had ever heard them.
She had drawn round her a kimono of pale yellow silk, starred with deeper yellow chrysanthemums. Denis had bought it at Port Said because he said it matched her hair. She hoped he would remember that. At his door she waited just a moment, the breath fluttering at her heart.
When she opened the door and stood just within it exquisitely shy, the colour flushed to her face, her lips a little tremulous, she made indeed a very perfect picture. The man standing staring at her from the centre of the room could not but be aware of that. All the love that was in him surged up into his eyes, his shaking hands.
“Claire,” he said hoarsely, “what is it? Has something frightened you?”
“No,” said Claire. She stood like a shaft of light, gold-brown hair, gold-yellow kimono. “I came because . .
The lashes veiled her eyes a second, she raised them to look straight at him. “Denis,” she whispered, “don’t you want me any more? Haven’t you forgiven me yet?”
“Forgiven you!” he answered. He came quite close to her; he stood looking down at her, shaken out of his morose stiffness by her beauty. “What have I to forgive, Claire?”
“My silliness in Nairobi,” she answered as she swayed against him; he could feel her warm, slim body under the soft silk, her hair brushed against his chin. “Aren’t you ever going to love me again?” said Claire, lips raised to his.
What answer was there to that? He held her against him, his kisses devoured her, he swept her off her feet.
“Claire, Claire,” he cried her name over and over again, and then as though it were wrung from him. “If only you loved me. Are you pretending just for a little to love me?”
Why would he not be content? Why must he probe after the truth? His wildness frightened her again, his kisses hurt. Instinctively she struggled to be free and immediately his hands closed, tightening about her to almost pain.
“You shan’t play with me any more,” he said harshly. “Tonight at least you shall be mine. I’m finished with pretence.”
She thought his eyes were like some animal’s. Terror gave her sudden strength. She twisted away from him and stood back to the door, hands spread out, breath panting.
“Denis,” she cried. “I don’t understand you. Why do you go on like this? Do you want me to hate you?”
The words seemed to sober him as a flash of cold water in his face might have done.
He looked at her with eyes from which all passion had been swept.
“I killed Madelaine for you,” he said, speaking very softly. “Didn’t you know that? Because I thought you loved me and she stood in between.”
Claire stood crouched away from him, hands gathered to her mouth.
“Denis,” she whispered, “what are you saying? You can’t mean that. It isn’t true.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” he said, his voice flat and toneless. “It sounds funny now, doesn’t it? I thought you loved me.” Sudden fire leapt to his eyes. “You did love me once, didn’t you?” he asked. “It wasn’t all pretence?”
She made no answer. There was none to make. Horror was surging over her in quick waves. She turned away heavily and went and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“That evening,” he went on speaking; “do you remember you said you were going away to think things out? I knew what that meant. You were going to shut me outside. I had hated Madelaine for years; her jealousy was round me like a cage. She knew I hated her and yet she wouldn’t let me go. I went back to the flat after I had said good-bye and left for Edinburgh. It was all so terribly easy. She was alone. I spoke to her about you. She laughed and said she would have it out with you that evening. You were not the type of girl who would steal another woman’s husband. She went to the ’phone to ring you up. . . .”
His voice went on, dull, level, monotonous. It surged about Claire’s ears. It seemed to be saying over and over again, “I killed her—for you—because you loved me—I killed her.”
“Listen, dear, you are ill. You are all shaken with illness. I think it must be fever. Let me help you into bed. Come Denis.”
The very quietness of her voice soothed him. He let her lay him on the bed, cover him over, smooth down his pillows.
“You heard what I said?” he asked once. “It’s damnably true. I killed her. She’s got every right to smile.”
“Yes—hush!” Claire answered. “She doesn’t smile, Denis. I’m sure she knows and understands.”
“Limuru has got the cutest hotel in the world,” Jack’s lady friend on the big boat out had told him. “You’ve simply got to spend a week-end there.”
With me, her eyes added, though her lips were demurely silent.
They had flirted together assiduously for most of the voyage. There had been something behind the hurt in Jack’s heart that drove him to desperate measures to forget. Mrs. Germaine was a desperate measure. And withal a very pleasant one. Still young enough to be styled a girl, but with a polished fitness about her love affairs which showed her very much a woman of the world. Charming to look at, with black hair that waved in a shine of triumph away from a perfectly proportioned face, with frank hazel eyes and surprisingly red lips. She challenged all men’s admiration, and, if the challenge lingered, it generally meant that June Germaine intended that particular victim to fall in love.
She had intended Jack to, from the first moment when she had most charmingly said, “This chair is horridly heavy. Could you cart it round to the other side of the deck for me?”
Rather cynically to start with, and in a spasm of desperate earnestness towards the end, Jack played up to her intentions. She interested him and—perhaps—flattered him. There are few men absolutely immune to the flattery of sex. She teased and challenged him, and confided in him suddenly. A queer, disturbing softness came about her at such times. A man was inclined to think that he was perhaps the first one who had ever been allowed a glimpse of June’s heart. Jack almost told her about Claire in return, but was just prevented from this mistake by a saving sense of humour.
Because, even with the moon at its most dangerous—and for the human emotions what can be more dangerous than a pale, full moon on silken waters?—Jack was never deluded into thinking there was any reality in the game they played. He knew Mrs. Germaine wished to be kissed, and he responded to the best of his ability. It was not at all unpleasant and he could not feel that it rendered him faithless to Claire, who had herself proved so singularly and heart-breakingly faithless to his ideal.
Mr. Germaine met June at Mombasa, and kissed her noisily before everyone’s rather astonished gaze. One could not imagine June having a husband who would kiss her; she had seemed singularly free of any tie of that sort. June had smiled faintly at Jack. “What is one to do?” her raised eyebrows had seemed to say. “One has to pay a certain price for respectability.”
Then she introduced the two men and Germaine welcomed Jack noisily to the country. He was a gentleman, apparently, who dealt in noise.
“You must come up to our place and stay,” he thundered; “you ask him, June. June’s damned dull up there. She likes a few men hanging round her.”
June smiled again, her eyes dancing at Jack. And it was then she added the remark about Limuru.
“They have a dance once a fortnight, Saturday night,” she further explained, Germaine having taken himself off to look after her luggage. “I always drive myself in. Tom never comes. It will be our good-bye—won’t it. Jack?”
He was a fool to go. June meant nothing to him. What could she mean to any man, giving as she did to all? Yet here he was, propping up the wall of the dance-room, waiting for the four dances she had promised to give him at the end of the evening.
He had not liked Nairobi. That had got something to do with it. Jack was oddly fastidious about places, and Nairobi had struck him as noisy, blatant, defiant. Nairobi was like a very modern young lady, who talked slang noisily, smoked innumerable cigarettes and wore shorts. Jack hated to see women wear shorts; there was something about their bare knees that shouted vulgarity. His official business in Nairobi had been very quickly settled. He was allotted his station—it was somewhere out in the wilds round Eldoret—given the name of the officer to whom he was to report, and permitted ten days’ leave in which to buy what he wanted and get himself there. He bought among other things a motor-bike and side-car, and, that accomplished, Nairobi held no further attractions for him. The idea of Limuru and a farewell dance with June offered quite a pleasant distraction. It was only about twenty-six miles out, he was told; he could go on from there on his bike; there was a road all the through to Eldoret. Jack left his luggage and his boy at police headquarters to be despatched on the first available train, and rode on his new bike up to Limuru.
The bike ran well; that put him in a good humour, and then Limuru, after Nairobi, was a surprisingly pleasant place, the hotel delightful.
A colony of small huts set in the midst of an amazingly beautiful flower-garden. Flowers that one did not dream to see out of England. Climbing roses, honeysuckle, Canterbury bells, forget-me-nots, all set round green lawns, traversed by little old-world paths of paved stone. Jack wandered about it and drew peace into his soul, drew also a certain disinclination to continue his flirtation with June. There was something in the scent of the honeysuckle that clambered about the little room which had been allotted to him that reminded him of Claire, making him feel for the time being as if the other thing was not worth while.
The effect of a vague scent, however, especially on a young man well endowed with a sense of humour, is bound to be transitory. Jack was not thinking of that as he stood waiting with his back to the wall of the dance-room. He was thinking how beautifully June danced, and how the silver thing that she wore in her hair seemed to shine out of its blackness like stars shining on a very dark night.
“You are not dancing,” a voice, pleasant because of its friendliness, sounded at his elbow. “Do let me introduce you to a lady who has had very few partners tonight.”
Jack recognized in the voice, in the stately grey-haired lady standing beside him, the personality who had welcomed him earlier in the day and shown him over the garden with a righteous pride.
“It’s kind of you,” he began.
“Oh, no,” she interrupted quickly. “It will be kind of you. She is such a dear and she gets so few partners.”
Jack followed meekly in her wake. He did not want to dance with anyone else but June. Once could not, however, easily refuse such placid kindness.
“Miss Burke,” he heard his hostess say. “Mr. Wellsley, didn’t you say?”
Jack acknowledged that as his name and asked Miss Burke for a dance. She did not, he decided with relief, dance at all badly. Her primly-dressed head of hair barely reached above his elbow, and he gathered that she did a lot of talking, most of which he did not hear. Jack always danced seriously. Music meant a great deal to him. He could not understand people wanting to talk while they danced.
Once the dance was finished, though, Miss Burke definitely engulfed him in conversation. She extracted piecemeal from him what his job was, where he was going, and how he was going to get there, and then desperately in earnest she sat forward, her hands tightly-pressed together, and surprisingly asked him whether he would start tomorrow and if he could take her with him.
He was, to say the least of it, startled, but her very earnestness compelled attention.
“It’s so desperately serious,” she said, her face all puckered into a frown. “Otherwise, of course, I should not dream of asking an absolute stranger like you. But someone whom I am very fond of is in grave danger. Oh, I ought to explain better,” she broke off and waved her hands about. “I had a letter from her this morning. I can read between the lines. I know what she has to fear. And she is so young and horribly alone. It’s thirty miles from Eldoret their place, right away from everyone.”
Jack wondered if she was quite sane. She looked sane enough.
“I was not thinking of going till Monday,” he confessed.
“Oh, if only you could——” besought Miss Burke. She was quite shameless in her request. “I only came to the dance in the vague hope there might be someone going through. When you said your destination just now it seemed as though Providence had arranged our meeting.”
For some reason or other a little breeze blowing across the garden brought to Jack suddenly a whiff of honeysuckle. Providence! Perhaps, after all, it would be Providence removing him from the end of his flirtation with June.
“If I can really be of any use,” he said stiffly.
Miss Burke fairly leapt at his agreement. “Use,” she chattered, “you’ve no idea. Oh, let me try and tell you a little.” The sound of the next dance floated out to them. “Or, you are dancing this, perhaps?” said Miss Burke.
“Not this one,” Jack answered, “and before the idea goes any further, Miss Burke, let me confess I don’t know my way to Eldoret; I don’t know the roads; they may be hopeless, or whether there are hotels where we have to stop. I have really only just arrived in the country.”
Things like that were not, he was to learn, going to dismay Miss Burke. She waved them aside.
“We’ll manage,” she said. “It’s so surprisingly good of you. I feel as though a weight had been lifted off my chest. That poor child—Johnston their name is—did I tell you that?” Her face frowned again. “He is a dreadful man,” she assured Jack; “dreadful. There is something ghastly behind him. I felt sure of that from the first. And now there is her letter. A cry for help. You see I was fairly pushed into asking you.”
He could see that she would be very determined about anything she really needed. There was an odd air of brisk determination about her bird-like animation.
“I am sure I am only too glad to help, if I can,” said Jack. He stood up. The woman would never stop talking unless he went away, and he could not honestly pretend to any very great interest in her mysterious “Johnstons”.
“You’ll be ready then at six tomorrow,” he said. “I am afraid I can only take a very small suit-case.”
“Oh, if you can take that, too, it will be heavenly,” said Miss Burke. She stood up, too. She wore old-fashioned, voluminous skirts. They rustled as she moved.
“I’ll go now and pack,” she added, “and get a little sleep. I shan’t keep you waiting, you may be sure of that. And if I haven’t said ‘Thank you’ properly before, I do it now. Thank you, thank you an hundredfold. . . .”
Jack got away somehow. He had the impression that he had been rather rude, and left her still saying “Thank you”. “My bike makes a fair amount of noise,” he consoled himself. “She won’t be able to do much talking tomorrow.”
It was a mad country he had come to, it seemed, where unknown females fairly hurled themselves at you and asked to be driven away into the blue. He could not connect scandal with Miss Burke’s appearance, otherwise he was not at all sure that he would have risked it. As it was, how was he to be certain of getting through without awkward happenings? Supposing the bike broke down? Supposing there were no such people as Johnstons anywhere near Eldoret? His senior officer would think him a pretty good ass arriving with a lady like that in tow.
By the end of his third dance with June, he regretted extremely that his good nature had allowed him to be imposed on by Miss Burke’s impetuosity. June danced divinely. She did not talk. She swayed and lived with music. Light as a feather, held against him as he might have held a flower, her head on a level with his lips so that his breathing stirred her hair and the perfume of her blew against his face. Jack was very susceptible to music; it intoxicated him as rare wine might. “If ever I propose,” he had once been known to say, “it will be when someone is playing the fiddle”. He had not lived up to that with Claire. But then he had loved Claire, the deeps in him stirred. She had moved always to music in his heart.
With June it was different. He needed common sense to be submerged by emotion in June’s case. When he went into the garden with her after the third dance, he went like a man in a dream. And out of the dream annoyingly emerged the fact that he was escorting a strange female called Miss Burke, three or four hundred miles in his sidecar, starting at six the next day.
It was nearly two a.m. now. If he was going to start driving across an unknown country road at six tomorrow, it was quite time, he began to think of bed. He said so, bitterly, sitting down beside June in the little alcove, flower-covered, flower-scented, that she had selected.
“You are going away tomorrow morning,” said June. There was a certain sharpness in her voice that did much to dissipate the spell of the music. “You can’t possibly. Jack.” Her voice softened. “This was to be our week-end.”
“Man proposes, God disposes,” said Jack, rather flippantly. “There’s a certain female here, by name of Miss Burke, who most urgently wants a lift through to Eldoret.”
“Miss Burke,” repeated June. She sat upright, her hands clenched. “Who on earth may she be?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Jack. “She’s not quite sane as far as I can judge; a perfectly plain lady who has a mysterious friend somewhere whom she simply must get to in the shortest possible time.”
“And you are the knight-errant,” said June scornfully. “I am afraid I don’t believe in the lady’s plainness.”
It was a stupid remark for her to have made; it flicked the last note of sentiment dancing from Jack’s brain.
“You think I am very susceptible, don’t you?” he said. She turned to flare her anger at him.
“You kiss where and when you can,” she said. “I am sorry I ever let you kiss me.”
“You did not object to it at the time,” he said grimly, yet half amused.
Perhaps she sensed the amusement, perhaps it was jealousy, because she knew herself not sure of her captive. Anyway, she stood up quickly; he could see her faint, pale face, the red blur of her lips.
“I hate all men,” she whispered fiercely. “With their kisses, their pretended reverence, their love! You are beasts, all of you; just beasts. Good-bye, Mr. Wellsley. Do you expect me to say thank you for our pleasant friendship?”
Jack stood up, too; he was more than a little amazed at her sudden rage.
“Look here, June,” he began, “what have I done? After all . . .”
She swept his words aside. “If you have thought anything of me, except what was vile,” she flamed, “you will not go away tomorrow with this other woman, that’s all, and good night. I’m too tired to dance any more.”
She was gone in a whirl of light grey and silver. She had thrown down her ultimatum, she never dreamt but that he would obey. And he, curiously enough, never dreamt even that it was an ultimatum. He wrote her a pleasant little note of farewell, because, after all, he did not want her to think that for any moment of their acquaintanceship he had considered her vile; and then at six o’clock the next morning with Miss Burke still voluble, packed in his side-car, he started forth on his three-hundred mile drive to Eldoret.
It was an annoying trip. Just about as annoying as it could be, but he had to admit that Miss Burke bore up with admirable fortitude. He had two punctures, and on each occasion Miss Burke perched herself on the bank in the shade, produced some knitting out of a bag she carried, and appeared quite oblivious of discomfort. She reminded him of his mother with that ridiculous knitting; she had the same rather abstracted way of looking about while she knitted as if it did not really matter to her at all what her hands did. Somehow that resemblance to his mother seemed to make Miss Burke very familiar to Jack. He took it quite meekly when she suggested that he should put his coat on, having got so hot over the repairing of the tyre. He found himself leaning sideways to try and catch what she was saying as they hummed along. She was a nice little thing, he had decided; he did not want her to be hurt by his never attempting to answer her remarks.
They arrived at Nakuru about four, three hours later than they had expected to be. He thought she would be very tired, but after tea on the hotel verandah she announced that she was not a bit fatigued, and that she would like to walk about and see the place. He found himself walking with her, rather to his surprise, stooping a little as he had had to do on the bike. She was short to walk beside him and talk; it gave him a crick in his neck trying to hear, but it did not annoy him nearly as much as he expected it would. And he was getting quite interested in the Johnstons. Miss Burke’s descriptions were so vivid. From her account he rather suspected Johnston of being a drug fiend. It did make one rather restless to think of the girl Miss Burke seemed to be so keen on, away with him, miles away from any help.
“She always made me think of that thing of Tennyson’s,” Miss Burke was saying. She quoted it for his benefit:
“Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls
Come hither, the dances are done.
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls
Queen lily, and rose in one.
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,
To the flowers and be their sun.”
That was when they were having dinner at a table for two in the hotel. How June would laugh if she saw them Jack thought suddenly!
“What made a girl such as you describe marry a rotter?” he asked.
“She’s so young,” Miss Burke answered. “One never knows what makes young girls do things. They get romantic ideas.”
He thought of Claire on that—Claire, who had married Tremayne. “I suppose they fell in love,” he said morosely. “There is no accounting for that, is there?”
“Love!” snorted Miss Burke. “Tosh! What do you think a girl knows about love? She stands at the door of life with her eyes bandaged, and it’s not always the first hand that tears the bandage off that touches her soul.”
“You mean,” asked Jack, “that she doesn’t always love the man she marries. I thought girls of today had more sense.”
“Young man,” said Miss Burke, “do you fancy that fashions alter human nature? Do you suppose that because girls of today smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails and even wear trousers”—she gave a crisp little shiver—“like they do out here, that they are any different from their grandmothers? Because they know things, learnt from silly books most of them, do you think the bandage is any more off their eyes? Stuff and nonsense! A girl knows just as little about herself as ever she did, and after all that’s the only knowledge that counts.”’
“I don’t know how they are to be helped then,” argued Jack. “I knew a girl at home and she fell in love with a married man at least twenty years her senior.” He stood up. “I’m not going to talk about it,” he said. “I hate talking about it. We shall start early tomorrow, Miss Burke, I think you ought to turn in.”
But after she had gone he sat on, on the verandah, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and thinking. She had started him thinking of Claire. Had he, after all, failed Claire? Had she been standing with her eyes bandaged, and because of her blindness had he turned away angrily and left her to her fate? Claire! What had happened to Claire? What was life giving her?
Odd, how love turned and twisted and dug at a man’s heart. June’s kisses had meant nothing to him, nothing. He had never kissed Claire, and yet the thought of her stayed there, aching in his life.
The next day’s journey proved even more fraught with disaster. Miss Burke was certainly paying for her temerity. The road was appalling, as he was to learn roads in Kenya can be. They climbed a steep escarpment, most of it over tree roots. Miss Burke jolted and bumped and was thrown from side to side of the side-car. Nothing disturbed her; her flow of conversation was unimpaired. A broken spring kept them for four hours, the lamps gave out and left them at sunset picking their way as best they could with the assistance of a very faint new moon.
At nine-thirty they turned in tired and weary at Jack’s station, still fourteen miles from Eldoret. A little square house loomed in front of them, raised on piles. A sentry challenged them at the entrance to a fenced-in enclosure.
“This must be the police post,” said Jack. “Thank goodness.” He had forgotten what his senior officer would say to his arriving at this time of night with a lady. “Are you desperately tired, Miss Burke?”
“Not at all,” said Miss Burke; she stepped out of the sidecar and advanced towards the house.
The figure standing on the steps waiting to welcome them raised its hands with a shout of amazement.
“By the heavens above,” yelled Captain Frinton, “it’s Miss Burke!” He hurried down the steps and grabbed her by the hands. “Now where have you sprung from? It’s this very day I’ve sent a letter to you, asking you to come!”
Tarleton brought his new case to a successful finish and handed over a shrinking, cowed creature to the hands of the hangman. He did not definitely do that, but reading details in his morning’s paper of the poor wretch’s last breakfast and tottering walk to the the scaffold, he got the uncomfortable impression that it was his hands that had led him there. Tarleton hated hangings. They warred in some way with his sense of justice. And yet they were just—common sense told him that. Never, if there was an possible means of escaping it, did English justice send a man to be hanged. He had seen that proved time and again. His tissue of evidence had to be flawless, every fact crystallised and clear, else would the judge seize on this or that discrepancy and the accused man would get off—to penal servitude. Some men said they preferred death, but Tarleton had never known a prisoner that did not place all his faith and hope on being let off death.
There was something horrible about hanging. No getting away from that. When Tarleton read about it in the papers, he would push his own breakfast away and sit brooding, because he had hounded a poor devil to that end. Yet it was just. One had to take the murdered person into account there. After all, they, too, had lived and loved and liked life well. Horror was stamped on their faces when one found them, horror and despair. They had not wanted to die. And murderers so often killed for futile, despicable reasons. Look at Tremayne, for instance. Tremayne had killed his wife because he was tired of her, because he had wanted to marry someone else. He had married the other girl, too; got right away with her. There was no justice in that. And yet, Tarleton took another look at his paper. There it was all set out in black and white. Tomlinson had asked for boiled eggs for his last breakfast. His wish, as usual, had been complied with. He had eaten heartily; till the last he had been buoyed up with the hope that the giant petition signed on his behalf would give him a reprieve. When the clergyman and the hangman finally arrived, he seemed to go off his head with horror. He shrieked and blasphemed and struggled. They had had to pinion him and carry him to the scaffold.
Horrible! Tarleton felt that he could never eat a boiled egg again with any pleasure. Tremayne, of course, would not go on like that. Tremayne belonged to the class that fronted even hanging with stoic calm. He would display no feeling. “The prisoner walked with calm steps to the scaffold and smiled when the hangman requested him to take off his collar.” That is how the hanging of Tremayne would read. But the horror would be there all the same. “I’m damned if it is justice,” thought Tarleton in a burst of sudden disgust. “They should just biff the man over the head when I hand in the facts of the case. That would be a life for a life. I wonder what the Almighty makes of this stunt of ours, letting them choose their breakfasts and reading the burial service over them before they are dead.” He got up impatiently and moved about his little room. He was, he knew, being ridiculous. The law could not adopt the same methods as the murderers. There had to be all this measured calm about a death-sentence; it was giving a man every possible chance to get off. And, after all, justice was justice. Tremayne ought to hang. His wife now; she had probably loved him, trusted him. What could she have felt when she saw the knife in his hand, recognized Death in his eyes?
“A defenceless woman, too,” grunted Tarleton, pausing by the window, staring out and seeing nothing but the picture of the bound and struggling man his paper had set before him. “I’m getting damned squeamish in my old age.”
Justice! He clung to that, he had really built his life on it. He was as proud of the justice of the English courts as is a mother of her child.
“It’s no use,” he sighed now, “I can’t go on monkeying about any longer. I don’t like their method of hanging people, but justice has got to be done somehow, and I suppose that is the best way we’ve found so far.”
He left his uneaten breakfast, thrust his hat on his head, and sallied forth.
The head of his department occupied a large office in the imposing building of Scotland Yard. Its windows fronted the Thames, its door was guarded by a rather pert office-boy.
“Tommy,” asked Mr. Tarleton, “is the boss in?”
“He is, sir,” jerked Tommy. “He’s got Miss Summers with him.”
“Well, then; I’ll wait,” said Tarleton, and turned his attention to the slow traffic that goes up and down the Thames.
“See as how you’ve polished off Tomlinson,” said Tommy, with the hardy effrontery which small boys of his class possess.
“Small boys like you might be better employed than reading the garbage of the newspapers,” was all he said.
Tommy chuckled.
“I’m going to be a detective, sir, when I’m old enough. I’m a fair sleuth-hound now.”
The door of the great man’s room opened and Miss Summers came out. She was a pretty girl, neat and effective in her business clothes. Tarleton viewed her frank smile, the little coquettish lift of her eyebrows, with morose disapproval. A rabbit-hutch at the bottom of the garden, or else a harem. Anyway, woman ought to be shut up. Let loose in the business world they were a positive menace to the peace and sanity of man. He was thinking of Tremayne and Claire at the moment, though he did not put his thoughts into words.
The great man received him with a nod.
“Well, Tarleton,” he asked, “something fresh on?”
“It’s not fresh, sir,” said Tarleton. He sat down. “You remember the Tremayne case?”
Mr. Glade frowned, remembering. He prided himself on never having to look up a case.
“Yes,” he announced. “Rich woman found murdered in a flat on the Chelsea Embankment. Any developments?”
“I’ve got my hand on the man,” said Tarleton morosely.
“Good!” exclaimed Glade, “very good. I never like a case to go through unsolved. Gives the public an uneasy feeling. Let’s see, this case is nearly a year old, isn’t it?”
“It is,” admitted Tarleton. “The man’s got away to East Africa.”
“He can be followed, though,” said Glade. He glanced sharply at Tarleton. “What’s on your mind, Tarleton?”
“Nothing,” said Tarleton. He could hardly explain the gloom caused by the morning’s paper. “It’s like this, sir. I’ve had it worked out for some time, but I haven’t been able to follow it out. Tomlinson’s case coming along as it did.”
“Ah, yes,” the great man smiled, “that was a bit of good work on your part, Tarleton. Now for this other case—just ring the bell, will you?”
Tarleton rang and, like a brief vision of spring, Miss Summers tripped into the room. “Oh, Miss Summers, please.” No change in Glade’s official voice, anyway, that was a blessing. “The Tremayne file, please, last June.”
Miss Summers flashed away and returned still daintily unconcerned, the file in her hands.
“Is that all, Mr. Glade?” she asked, and vanished out of the room again on his dismissal.
“Now, Tarleton,” said Glade. The papers open before him, he rustled through them. “Ah, I see, the inquest verdict still holds good—Murder, by someone unknown. You say——”
He glanced up. Tarleton cleared his throat, justice above everything else was justice.
“Mr. Tremayne killed his wife,” he said. “I’ve every little detail. He gave out he was going to Edinburgh; drove his car the other side of the block of flats and left it; went back; walked up the stairs, the lift-boy being absent; let himself into the flat. The knife he used was an ornamental one hanging in the hall. Mrs. Tremayne was alone, her maid having had leave to go out. They had an argument; one can only presume it was about the girl, Miss Holland, whom Mr. Tremayne has since married. He was very much in love and Mrs. Tremayne was bitterly jealous. He killed her—the knife you’ll remember had broken in her throat. That done, he made his way out by the fire-escape, rejoined his car, and drove to the station, catching his train by the barest fluke. Owing to some trouble on the line it was twenty minutes late in starting.”
“You are quite certain of these facts?” asked Glade, purely as a matter of form. Tarleton never gave facts unless he was quite certain.
“Quite,” said Tarleton. “And, if more is needed, here it is. He felt in his pockets and produced a letter. It was torn and soiled; it had apparently been immersed in water, but it was still decipherable.
I’m tired of life—the strange epistle ran, without beginning, without apparent end. I’m finishing with it. But before I go out, I put on record that Tremayne killed his wife. He probably had good reason to, that’s why I haven’t spoken before. She was a poisonous woman, bitter as death to her own blood. I went to the flat to get the papers that were mine by right. I thought they would both be away. They weren’t, though. I heard voices when I got to the balcony. I crouched, listening. He killed her. She asked for it, I must say that. He passed quite close to me going out. But he didn’t see me. I slipped in and looked for the papers. They weren’t there—she had destroyed them. That’s all; I go out tonight. It was signed faintly, Tom Wargrave, and dated.
Glade looked up from reading it. “Of course,” he said, smiling at Tarleton, “this really means very little. Your facts are founded on other things.”
“Naturally,” said Tarleton. “I had worked them out before I found this letter.”
He stood up. Glade glanced after him. “It remains,” he suggested, “to send and have Tremayne arrested. How about your going, Tarleton? He’ll have to be identified, I suppose.”
He saw the other’s hesitation. “It will be a nice trip for you,” he added. “You’ve been rushed lately. A sea voyage means rest.”
Ten days later the Llan Stephan Castle, sailing from Tilbury for Mombasa, showed among its passenger list the name of Mr. Tarleton. A name that conveyed very little to fellow-travellers, who knew neither his mission nor his destination.
For the whole of the day after the crisis in Denis’s illness, the sunshine persisted about the house. It glinted in the corners, it showed the dust to be lying thick over unseen places where the boys, freed from the surveillance of Yonosani, had not lately dusted. To Claire, at least, there was a sense of freedom in this sunshine, a feeling as though some giant shadow, had lifted. Captain Frinton’s brief visit, for he had not been able to stay long, had helped her to live past the memory of the night. And all day, Denis had dozed, resting with a quietness that had long been foreign to his sleep; waking when Claire roused him to take nourishment, smiling at her, whispering her name before he dropped off again.
She was very thankful for this respite while he slept. Memory was shut away from his mind for the time being; she tried to shut it from hers.
She stayed with Denis all day, ordering Yonosani away to take a well-earned rest. Captain Frinton had said he would come back on the morrow and bring a doctor. She had not dared to send for one before, for Denis, in his delirium, had raved of many terrible things. But Frinton had told her she must have one and she had not liked to disagree.
At seven o’clock Yonosani came on duty to relieve her, Denis seemed to be sleeping very peacefully. Claire whispered a few directions—she would leave both doors open and Yonosani was to call her at the slightest need—and tip-toed out of the room. The verandah was but dimly lit under a hanging hurricane lamp; the garden showed dark and shadowed; just the faint ghost of a new moon peering through the trees. Claire moved quickly; she was tired, and after the brightness of the day, this half-dark struck cold. She was almost at the door of her own room when she saw Madelaine again. The figure was standing on the far side of the circle of light thrown by the hurricane lamp. As Claire gave a quick gasp of horror, drawing back It turned its head and looked at her, smiling a slow, cruel smile, sharp teeth, glinting for a moment between scarcely-parted lips. Then it too, drew back, seemingly, and vanished.
Claire stood terror-stricken; what was she to do? Where hide? Fear stretched long hands out of the gathering dark and plucked at her heart. Even as she hesitated Yonosani came to the door of Denis’s room.
“What is it, mem-sahib?” he asked. “I saw you stop. Did you call?”
She swayed round to face him and her evident desperation brought him quickly to her side.
“What is it?” he whispered again, peering round him with his old eyes.
Claire watched him, fascinated with the horror of the quest. Would she see sudden fear leap to life on his face? No, quite imperturbable, if a little anxious, his glance came back to hers.
“There is nothing here, mem-sahib,” he said. “Perhaps some shadow frightened you.”
“Yes,” she answered dully, “that must have been it, Yonosani. Go back to the master.”
The Thing was to be hers alone now; there was no use in dragging those other two back into the horror. It needed courage, though, to go on alone. Claire did it quickly, head erect. Within her own room she paused and looked back. There was nothing there, only the light swayed by the wind that had got up danced with the shadows on the wall. Her own-room! She started round. There was a shadow there by the cupboard that might hide anything. She would not look at that again. She undressed as quickly as she could, frantic that sleep should close about her eyes before she saw anything else. She threw herself down on the bed and lay, face half-buried in the pillow. How quiet the night was! No sound, no stir, no life. Her lamp burnt brightly, that was something. “Dear God, hold me safe,” she whispered, “and let me sleep.”
Sleep came almost at once. A sense of sinking, a blackness that surged about Claire and closed her in. When the dream first started she could not have said. It grew slowly and relentlessly, till at last it stood out from the surrounding dark, clear-cut, unmistakable. Madelaine beside her bed, looking down at her! White, cold lips curled back from white gleaming teeth! There was no life anywhere, except in the eyes, and they blazed with hate. The fine, white hands stayed stark and spread out against the darkness of the dress. Claire noticed that, with the painful intensity that one brings to bear on such small things in dreams; she wondered and wondered why Madelaine’s hands stayed like that so spread out and stark. She was not, to begin with, afraid. In her dream she watched Madelaine bend over her, closer and closer.
Not till the cold, white lips touched soft against her neck did terror seize Claire, and then it was terror such as she had never experienced before, such as she knew she never could feel again and yet live. And all the while a dead weight lay on all her limbs, seemed bound about her heart with bands of iron.
She dared not stir, or cry out, or pray. Those cold lips moved and mouthed about her till they found that warm spot beneath the chin where a small pulse flutters and beats against the pressure of the skin.
The sudden smarting pain woke Claire; scattered the dream. She sat up shrieking, hands clasped about her throat. The room was in darkness, the lamp out. Yonosani, as he came pelting along the verandah, snatched at the hanging lamp and brought it with him in shaking hands. The other boys came running from the outside houses; they stood grouped on the verandah, staring round them, questioning each other. What had happened? Who had cried out? Denis, gaunt and haggard-looking, staggered past them, stumbled his way into Claire’s room, stood holding on to the bed-post in his weakness.
“What is it, Claire?” he asked. His fear-haunted eyes stayed on her where she crouched, sitting up on the bed, hands still about her throat. “What frightened you?”
If anything could have restored her sanity it was his need. That fought through the clouds of her own terror.
“It’s nothing,” she managed to whisper. “I—I had a bad dream. Denis, go back to bed, dear. You oughtn’t to be up.”
“But your hands, why are you holding your throat?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” she answered quickly. Would there be blood if she took her hands away? she wondered.
“Denis, please let Yonosani help you back. I’ll slip on my dressing-gown and follow just to show you I’m all right.”
“You are sure,” he persisted. “I—I don’t know what I thought when you screamed.”
“Quite sure,” she forced a smile. “I’m sorry, Denis, but I was really asleep.”
He let Yonosani help him away then. The other boys dispersed. There was no mark on Claire’s throat. She could hardly believe her own eyes, so sharp had the pain been, so real the terror.
It must then have been a dream. Only—only how real it stayed. If she shut her eyes she could see again the stark, white hands on the black dress, feel the terrible mouthing of those cold, white lips.
She pulled on her dressing-gown quickly and hurried along to Denis’s room. He was lying spent and exhausted against his pillows; his face showed no more colour than their whiteness. She had to make Yonosani get him some brandy, and after he had swallowed it she sat beside him, her hand on his.
“I’m so dreadfully sorry, Denis,” she said. “It’s given you a bad shock, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he answered. He lay silent tor a little, his eyes looking beyond her. “Do you know,” he whispered presently, “I thought that Madelaine had gone.”
The misery in his voice tore at Claire’s heart. “Denis, she has,” she lied bravely. “I was going to tell you. I don’t think you will ever see her again.”
“But you,” he asked. “Didn’t you dream of her tonight?”
“No, no,” she said quickly. “That was some other quite silly nightmare of my own.”
Again he lay quiet for some time; she hoped he was falling asleep, but presently she felt his hand tugging hers and she had to bend her head down to hear what he was saying.
“Sometimes, I think she won’t be satisfied till I’ve paid the price.” His voice lagged wearily over the words. “I should do it quickly, Claire, before the blight falls on you.”
“Ah! Don’t speak like that,” she begged. “It hurts, Denis. You forget I love you.”
He moved her hand till it lay against his cheek and turned his lips to it and kissed it.
“Thank you, my dear, for that most generous lie,” he whispered, and after that he did seem to fall asleep, the smile of it still on his lips.
Claire sat and watched beside him. She felt ill and tired and more terribly depressed than she had ever been in her life. The sense of illness flooded her being with a great heat, throbbed in her brain, beat behind her eyes. Her lips felt parched and dry, one small spot on her throat ached as a burn might have done. When Yonosani brought tea in the morning she had just enough sense left, beyond the throbbing bewilderment of her brain, to sign to him to help her out of the room.
“I’m ill,” she whispered, for Denis still slept. “You’ll have to look after the master, Yonosani. I’ll lie down in the drawing-room, not in my bed. I can’t go to my bed.”
He made her as comfortable as he could, with pillows on the sofa, a blanket tucked round. Before he had finished she was turning her head from side to side, oblivious of his presence, complaining in a hoarse, queer whisper of the spot of pain that burnt on her throat.
So they found her, Miss Burke, Captain Frinton and the doctor, when they arrived an hour or two later, and Miss Burke, at any rate, thought that they had got there too late to be of much help. From Denis they received a whispered account of the night’s happening. Claire had been overdoing it, of course, nursing him. She had gone to bed tired out, she had awakened screaming. Had come into his room for a little, sat by him till he fell asleep, and Yonosani had found her in the morning, almost delirious then with fever.
Malarial meningitis, the doctor opined it might be. He was new to the country he admitted, and not very much up in such things. Anyone could see the girl was dangerously ill.
“Best thing we can do is to run her into hospital,” he said. “You should take Johnston, too, then,” said Frinton. “He can hardly look after himself.”
“He’s a convalescent,” argued the doctor. “We are very overfull and understaffed in hospital as it is. That head boy seems to have heaps of sense.”
For that matter, Denis announced that he would very much rather not be moved, and since Miss Burke could be of no use in the hospital, she kindly volunteered to come back and look after him. There was no enthusiasm in his acceptance of that offer, but to the other two men it seemed and excellent idea.
Miss Burke, however, insisted that she should drive into the hospital with Claire, Captain Frinton to stay at Ndogo for the time being.
So Claire was driven into the hospital at Eldoret, held in Miss Burke’s arms, and it was to Miss Burke that she reiterated her hoarse, bewildered whisper.
“Don’t let me sleep. I mustn’t sleep. It is waiting for me when I sleep. My throat aches; don’t let me sleep.”
“They often, in brain fever, have a horror of sleep,” the doctor rather timidly tried to assert.
Miss Burke glanced at him wearily and decided there was no use putting her theory into practice there. If what she had felt to be true, Claire’s only hope of health and sanity lay in Mr. Johnston’s hands. Miss Burke felt it behoved her to get back to him as quickly as possible and start working from that end.
Three weeks in which the hope of saving Claire’s sanity sank very low in Miss Burke’s heart. For it had come to be that of which they were afraid. Malarial meningitis—as well call it that name as any other—the case was at least outside the scope of the Eldoret doctor’s experience. He could do nothing, except endeavour to keep up the patient’s strength, and fight with narcotics the dread of sleep which seemed to hold her brain.
And all that time Miss Burke waited and watched; it was all she could do.
The man, on whose strength she waited, struggled back to health so slowly. Lay, it almost seemed, comatose through the days; languid, inert. They did not dare tell him of the seriousness of Claire’s illness; he did not seem to realize the length of time she had been away. He never spoke of her, never asked after her—though every day, with some punctilious idea of its being her duty. Miss Burke would set forth for his benefit a carefully-prepared report of Claire’s progress. Towards the end of the second week she persuaded him to dress and come out on to the verandah.
It was a bright, cheerful day, and things were beginning to look up on the Shamba. Both Frinton and Wellsley had helped over that, running over when either of them could be spared to lend Miss Burke a hand. They had engaged porters for her, started the work of cleaning. Already the garden looked a different place, the paths brushed and weeded, the flower-beds tidied up.
Miss Burke watched the man’s eyes resting on all this, and a little hope stirred in her heart. If she could only get him strong enough to put the case clearly before him. Surely he loved Claire enough to . . .
Her thoughts broke off, for Denis’s voice snapped them.
“Miss Burke,” he was saying, “how long has Claire been away?”
“Nearly three weeks,” she answered quickly “You haven’t kept much count of time lately.”
“No,” he admitted, “I live in a dream.” He looked straight at her, and something in his eyes woke pity in Miss Burke’s heart. “Is Claire going to live?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” she answered, flustered out of her usual attitude of fierce criticism of the man. “The doctor has no fear of that now.”
Had she stressed the “that” too much? She glanced at him quickly, but he was looking away from her again.
“She has been terribly ill, you know,” she added. He did not seem to hear her; he was staring over the garden, his lips twitching. Miss Burke got up hastily and left. “If I had stayed,” she thought, “I should have said something to him, and I mustn’t; he’s not strong enough yet.” No one was allowed to see Claire; they said at the hospital that her brain must have complete rest. She was better surrounded by strangers. A face that she knew might start a dangerous strain on memory. So Miss Burke never saw her, but every other day she drove in, in the Dodge, to ask how Claire was getting on, to see the matron and find out just what she thought. On this day, a day or two after Denis’s first coming out on to the verandah, as Miss Burke came out of the hospital and moved down the steps towards the waiting Dodge, she saw a white man standing beside it talking to the driver. He was evidently a new arrival in Eldoret; she could tell that by his clothes, by the large, brand-new sun-helmet that adorned his head. She put him down with one of her quick decisions, as being a tourist.
As she came level with the car he turned and raised his hat. “Excuse me,” he said. “In this country one takes all sorts of liberties, it seems. Is this not Mr. Johnston’s car?”
“It is,” said Miss Burke a shade stiffly, though she had to admit that the man’s appearance, the cut of his chin, his steady, grey eyes, gave one a sense of confidence.
“Ah!” said the man, “and you are just driving out to Mr. Johnston’s place, having been into the hospital to see his wife.”
“Really,” began Miss Burke. “You seem to know a great deal,” she added sarcastically. “Can I oblige you with any further information?”
“I must sound curious,” admitted the man. “I ought to introduce myself. My name is Tarleton—Mr. Tarleton—and I was going to ask you to give me a lift out to Mr. Johnston’s place.”
Tarleton! The name jumped into its proper category at once. Let this be said for Miss Burke, she had a marvellous mind for details. “I was with Tarleton, the Tarleton on the case,” Mr. Wellsley had said.
She stood staring at him, this man in his tourist clothes, his brand-new sun hat!
Tarleton came a step nearer; now his eyes very grey, very steady, were like cold steel. “My name evidently conveys something to you,” he said. “Perhaps you already know what my mission is.”
Before Miss Burke answered she glanced back instinctively at the hospital. His eyes followed hers and he nodded.
“She’s out of it,” he said, surprisingly voicing her thoughts. “I was glad when I heard that.”
Miss Burke opened the door of the car and got in at the back.
“Will you sit in front with the driver, please?” she said. “The drive takes about an hour and a half.”
She shirked conversation; he was the last person to impose it on her. Not once during the drive did Tarleton glance round at her or open his mouth. She was left to her own thoughts.
Ndogo came in sight; the car swept up the cleared drive and stopped at the steps. Yonosani hurried down to open the doors. It would be just about lunch-time, Miss Burke remembered, with a shiver of distaste. Would this man stop and have lunch? Somehow, the crisis which she herself had been waiting to bring about seemed awful to her now that it had come. At the far end of the verandah she could see Denis’s long chair; he was just rising languidly to greet her.
Tarleton stepped out of the car behind her, followed her in silence up the steps. Such agitation held her now that she could hardly speak.
“Will you let me,” she began, mumbling the words, and then, as Denis’s figure drew near, “Mr. Johnston—oh, wait——”
Tarleton was before her, though. Her distress was pitiful, undignified; this thing should be between men. He stepped past her, his hat in his hand.
“Mr. Tremayne,” he said quietly, “I expect you remember me. You will know why I am here.”
It was just done like that, quietly, steadfastly. No scene, no histrionics. Thinking it over afterwards Miss Burke decided that she had never realized before how much there is in man to respect. She was over-shadowed by the two of them—her pity was ridiculous; her desire to avoid tragedy out of place. Stark truth was there between the two men, and they faced it unmoved.
One quick glance Tremayne gave her, and then, seeing that she knew, he swept her into the scheme of things and forgot her strangeness to it altogether.
“Claire knew nothing of it”; he said that first. “She is absolutely innocent.”
“I guess so,” agreed Tarleton. “I only for one moment thought otherwise.”
“We go back at once, I suppose,” said Tremayne. “I shan’t see her again.” His eyes rested once more on Miss Burke. “Is there any reason,” he asked, “why she should know this has happened?”
It was no use. Miss Burke could not bring herself to speak, she was too perilously near hysterics. Tarleton was always a person of few words; he did not feel it was up to him to give any answer. He turned and walked the length of the verandah. Settle it your own way, his back seemed to say.
Tremayne came nearer to Miss Burke. “Don’t you see,” he argued, “it is so hideously ugly? If one can only keep this from her. You say it will be months before she is strong again. You could keep the papers and things from her. Tell her I died out here.”
Claire was getting better. Feeling her way slowly, very slowly, back to health. First sleep came to her aid, sleep, untroubled by dreams. It seemed she could not have too much of it; she lay dozing, dozing through the long still days. Then very quietly memory began to take shape in her mind. Her thoughts were like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle that would not as yet fit. She was too sleepy to bother with them very much. But here and there, bits showing some distinct picture would stand out. Her mother’s face, worried, nervous, a letter that had come from mother! Ndogo, the verandah at Ndogo—a swaying hurricane lantern! Fear was in some way connected with that picture. It made Claire restless. The nurse, tip-toeing into the room, noticed her restlessness.
“Mrs. Johnston is beginning to remember,” she reported to matron. “I think some of her people should be sent for.”
So Miss Burke still living on at Ndogo, whither she had insisted on returning to keep things in order for Claire, was told the next time she came that she was to be allowed to see Mrs. Johnston. Mrs. Johnston appeared to be beginning to take an interest in her surroundings.
“Mr. Johnston has been called away,” said Miss Burke to the matron. “I shall have to explain.”
“Probably not just yet,” the matron told her. “It is very doubtful if Mrs. Johnston will take any definite interest as yet. If she even recognizes you we shall feel some progress has been made.”
Miss Burke crept into the shadowed room, stood looking down. They had shaved Claire’s hair; it was just growing again now. She looked like a very young, very slight boy. After all she had lived through her face showed very quiet, like a placid mask. Miss Burke looking down at her realized suddenly how young she was, how in reality untouched by the tragedy that had swept round her. All life was still in front of her; this would lie in the past—be like a dream that is dreamt and finished with. Youth can so quickly throw aside the memories that hurt.
Claire opened vague eyes and looked up at her. Behind the vagueness a faint smile stirred.
“It’s Alice, isn’t it?” said Claire, groping for words.
“Alice—Miss Burke?”
Miss Burke took her hand quickly and sat down by the bed.
“You poor dear thing,” she said. “Do you really remember me?”
“Of course,” whispered Claire. She turned her eyes away. “How long have I been ill?” she asked.
“Nearly six weeks,” answered Miss Burke. She dreaded the next question. “This is the first time you have recognized anyone.”
“What a long time”; the faint whisper reached her. “Has anyone told mother, written mother?”
“Oh yes, my dear, of course,” said Miss Burke. “When you really turned the corner we sent a cable.”
“Now,” she thought, “I’ve done it. That will make her remember. She will ask about him now.”
But as a matter of fact Claire was not remembering. The jig-saw puzzle danced before her eyes; she was too weary to pick up the pieces.
Miss Burke tip-toed away. “How terribly fragile she seems,” she confided, to the matron.
The matron smiled. “What did you expect?” she asked. “Never mind. You wait and see. She’ll soon pick up now.”
But it was quite another week before Claire greeted Miss Burke with the long-dreaded question. The puzzle was clear in Claire’s mind by then, the picture had fitted into place.
“Alice,” she said that afternoon, sitting propped up among her pillows “tell me about Denis. Where is he?”
Miss Burke gulped, also she got up quickly and moved to the window, standing with her back to Claire for a minute or two. There had been nothing so far in the home papers, but Denis and that other man must be home by now. When she turned her face was all red and obstinate. Claire, seeing it, smiled a rather piteous smile.
“You needn’t be afraid, Alice,” she said. “I am wonderfully stronger these last few days. At first I didn’t remember but since—oh, last Tuesday—I have known that something must be the matter with Denis as he has not come.”
Miss Burke gulped again and came back to the bed. “You would have to know sooner or later,” she said. “We have put off telling you as long as we could. Claire, he is dead.”
She could not say more than that. The words just broke off there; she watched Claire’s face with desperately anxious eyes. Was so bald an announcement going to prove more than the frail strength could bear?
A little shiver swept over Claire’s face; her eyes widened, fear crept into them. “Not dead!” she whispered. “Oh, Alice, I can’t bear to think of him as dead.”
Miss Burke sat down quickly on the bed and put her hands on Claire’s pallid ones.
“Listen, dear,” she said. “Let me tell you. He left a message for you with me. I think he knew that you would be afraid of death for him, and he wanted you to know that in the end it was so quick and simple. ‘Tell Claire,’ he said, ‘that at the end I was not frightened. She has seen me so horribly frightened. I would like her to know that all that went before the end.’”
Claire lay listening, fear still stayed in her eyes. “Alice,” she whispered, “tell me, because I think you know. Madelaine, could Madelaine stand between his soul and God?”
“My dear,” said Miss Burke very gravely, “no one and nothing could do that.”
She rose. Claire might be weak, but it would be better surely to wipe the nightmare off her heart for once and all.
“I know what you mean,” she went on gravely. “He, too, knew. I think that is why he gave me that message. I came to Ndogo on the heels of your letter, Claire. You told me in it, just very vaguely outlined, of the haunting that your husband and Yonosani had seen. That is what you mean when you speak of Madelaine, isn’t it? I know that you yourself have seen.” Her eyes held Claire’s. “What you did that night, offering yourself in place of him, took all fear from your husband’s heart. You must believe that, my dear. When he died he was free, absolutely free from the agony that had held his mind so long.”
“You are sure?” said Claire; her head turned restlessly on the pillow. “Sure I did not fail him, Alice?”
“I am sure as I am of God’s mercy,” said Alice. “And, after all, we build our faith on that, don’t we, Claire?”
“Around us are the Everlasting Arms,” whispered Claire. “Oh, Alice, if only he has proved that to be true.”
She did not speak of him again. She asked no further questions. If she thought of him, she said nothing of her thoughts. She lay slack and quiescent, letting them do things for her, eating and drinking when she was told, smiling faintly when they spoke to try and cheer her up.
The doctor and matron in consultation decided that she would probably do better now away from the hospital. Miss Burke, talking the matter over with Captain Frinton and Jack, settled on Limuru as being a suitable place to take their invalid to.
“She’ll love the flowers,” Jack said, “and the quiet of the place. In one of those little huts you can shut yourself right away from the other people.”
So Limuru was decided on. Captain Frinton took ten days’ leave and escorted the two ladies down there in his car. He was horrified at Claire’s frailty, at her lack of life.
“You aren’t thinking of dying, are you?” he asked her, with his bluff eagerness. “Miss Burke and I have been watching over you like a couple of mother hens this last two months.”
Claire laughed. It was the first time she had been known to do that since her illness.
“Oh no,” she said, “I shan’t die. You’ve all been very good to me,” she added slowly. “I wonder why?”
“Well, there’s such a thing as getting fond of people in this world,” said Captain Frinton. “I’m ridiculously fond of you myself.”
He was good for her, anyway. His robustness nerved her, his cheeriness brought colour into her life. Miss Burke was sorry when he had to go. She took up the task of being cheerful for Claire’s sake bravely enough, but she was not always sure that her methods were successful. It sometimes seemed as though her watchful care, her thoughtfulness, got on Claire’s nerves. There were times when Claire tried to escape from her, once or twice when she quite definitely flared round.
“I must be alone, Alice. Can’t you realize that?”
Wretched days, always followed by due penitence on Claire’s part. But at least she was growing stronger, colour was creeping back into her face, beauty into the lines of her figure. It was winter at home now. The doctors had told Claire she must not dream of going home in the winter. She never seemed to want to open a paper or a book. In all those ways Fate played into the hands of Miss Burke, seemed to be helping her to keep the secret.
They had one of the little huts furthest from the main building of the hotel. You came up to it by a path bordered with violets. It had its own private garden, two beds of sweet-scented carnations, a hedge of honeysuckle and jasmine. There was a little wooden seat in the garden. You could sit there and feel yourself closed in with flowers. There were very few people staying in the hotel; it was the off-season time. Claire and Miss Burke would go for walks when Claire was strong enough for that, long rambles through cedar forests or out across rolling hills of grass. It was unlike anything one could possibly imagine Central Africa to be like. Claire was forgetting, Miss Burke felt; was healing her soul and mind with the quiet beauty of the place. Very rarely now did she ever show any sign of remembering.
One day Miss Burke got a letter from Captain Frinton; it enclosed a little cutting from some paper. “Look at the papers,” the letter ran. “I saw this just by chance.”
Miss Burke’s hands trembled as she opened the cutting. Claire had gone off by herself that morning. Miss Burke had been a little hurt and stayed at home because she had felt she was not wanted.
“Tremayne confessed to the murder of his wife before his execution, which took place yesterday,” the newspaper report ran. Miss Burke glanced at the date. The paper in her hand was six weeks’ old. There would be other papers, probably, lying about on the hotel verandah. Supposing Claire was idly to pick one up—look through it!
Miss Burke shuddered and hurried down to the main building. There was no sign of Claire. There was only a young man on the verandah with his back to Miss Burke. The back seemed oddly familiar to Miss Burke as she crossed over to it.
“You’ve come,” she said, a shade fiercely.
Jack swung round to greet her.
“By this morning’s train,” he acknowledged. “Don’t you think I’ve waited long enough?”
Miss Burke did not know what to think. The printed words from the paper kept moving about at the back of her mind. She was seeing Tremayne again as she had seen him that last time, standing in Claire’s room, his tragic eyes on her face. He had walked—the paper that Frinton had sent her had gone on to say—with a faint smile to the scaffold; the execution had barely taken ten seconds. Miss Burke felt a little shaken, curiously moved.
“Claire is out somewhere,” she said. “She said she was going up the hill at the back of the hotel. Will you go and find her?”
She turned away and sat down on a chair there, watching him stride away into the sunshine. She had no doubt that Claire would love him and marry him and pass right out of her life. No one ever stayed with any intensity in Miss Burke’s life, and she had no life except in other people’s lives. She was always living through the agonies, watching their joys dance past her. She had lived through a great deal for Claire. To the end of her life she would remember the agony on Tremayne’s face, think of it in connection with that silly phrase in the paper, “He walked with a faint smile to the scaffold.”
At least she had not been wrong when she had told Claire that he had not been afraid in the end.
“It’s time,” said Miss Burke to herself, “that I went home to Ealing, found some real work to do. I waste life rushing about, getting fond of people. The thing won’t be mentioned after this week’s papers,” she thought, “then I can go.”
Her farm that she had been going to buy merged into the air without Claire, and Claire would not want to share it now. Miss Burke felt a little old, a little weary and terribly unwanted sitting there. She was always building up dreams and having to pull them down again.
“But at least I helped,” her thoughts went on. “Even in this I am helping a little. It would hurt her horribly to know.”
She got what comfort she could out of that. Captain Frinton who came to know her very well, who knew of her disappointment over the farm, said it was a big comfort.
“Being useful to other people,” he said of her. “That’s Miss Burke’s life. After all, it’s a jolly decent sort of life to lead.”
Perhaps it was. Anyway, it built up memories for her. She treasured odd experiences. This had surely been one of the oddest she had ever had.
So Miss Burke fades out of the picture. Gently, with a certain dignity, that belonged by rights to her old-fashioned appearance. Jack, at least, was always undyingly grateful to her. He feels she helped to save Claire’s sanity, if not her life.
Up in Limuru a very keen wind sometimes blows. It comes straight off the snow summit of Mount Kenya. It is one of the surprises that Africa has to offer you, this keen, snow-tinged wind blowing across a tropical sun. Today it was everywhere, sharpening up every corner of the hillside, making the long grass sway and dance, bending the trees before its quick, cold breath. It had chased the sky bare of clouds; it had flurried the birds into eager, noisy protest among the branches. It was gay and happy, and clean and swift, and Claire out alone on the hillside felt it calling her, singing to her, rousing in her a desire for new life, for the youth that was hers by rights, for the joy that must somewhere be waiting for her.
She stood on the highest point she could reach of the hill that she had started out to climb that morning, and looked down, through this rollicking wind, at all the Athi plains spread out before her like a map. It was very beautiful, this land that she and Denis had come to, hoping to find a new life. At Ndogo she had not been able to see its beauty; the loneliness, the barrenness, the harshness had cramped all beauty there. Poor Denis, even this land in which he had hoped to find forgetfulness and peace had shown him only its hard and bitter side. Poor Denis, poor, tortured Madelaine! Claire had been thinking of them both today. They had no more power to hurt in her thoughts. Denis had died and in the end he had not been afraid. She was content to accept that, to close her mind to the agony that had gone before. Perhaps it had all been some hateful, haunting dream. Some madness that had crept about his heart. She could not believe now that she had ever heard him say, “I killed Madelaine because I thought you loved me, and she stood in between”. She would not think of it, not now that he was dead.
She was alive! Thus does youth trample over memories and death and sorrow. Today she was most vividly alive. That was why she had got cross with Alice today, because Alice had said, “Do you think you ought to go for so long a walk? Remember, you are still far from strong.”
Dear, patient, obstinate Alice! “What a pig I am to her sometimes,” thought Claire.
She sat down there, where the wind could still blow about her, and thought of how much she owed Alice, how grateful she should be to Alice. She sat in a singularly youthful position, her knees up, her hands clasped round them. She could always be grateful to Alice, but she could not buy a farm with her and settle down with her. There were too many memories grouped round Alice: ghosts and Denis and that strange night of terror that had ushered in her illness. She wanted to push past them all and forget.
“I must go home,” thought Claire. “To Mummy and Gladys and Daddy. And after that, we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll travel; there’s all the world to see. Give Gladys a good time. Oh, there’s heaps I can do.”
Perhaps her thoughts were a little selfish, sitting up there, her chin on her knees, the wind blowing about her. But let it be remembered that she was young, and the young so very soon forget the dead. It is Nature’s wish that they should, since all that they possess comes down to them through generations who have died.
And then, with a little start of compunction, Claire remembered that Alice would be waiting for her, probably be worrying about her because she had stayed out so long. She jumped up, and the wind whipped her short black skirt round her, and showed her standing lithe and young and very fair.
That was how Jack saw her. He came up to her out of the trees; a belt of forest crossed the hill just there. He knew she would not have the slightest idea who he was, for no one had told her of his being near, and she would picture him still in England probably. He wanted to see surprise leap into her face, pleasure dawn in her eyes. He wanted her to give a little startled cry and hold out her hands and call his name. So he came softly up to her, his eyes on her face, and instead of doing any of the things he expected, she stood quite still, waiting for him, her eyes meeting his.
Then, when he was quite close, she spoke.
“You!” she said. “All day I’ve felt that something wonderful was going to happen.”
“And am I that?” he asked. Not words that he had planned at all in greeting.
She nodded. “I think so,” she whispered. “You’ve come to find me, haven’t you?”
He stood a little lower than she, his face on a level with hers. He could see now the colour flooding her face, her neck close to where the soft, white blouse opened.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Today I have come to find you.”
He held out his hands and, laughing a little, she took them.
“This wind,” she said, “is silly. It blows sense out of one’s head. Jack, how did you get here? How did you know I was here?”
Jack did not answer. He was standing looking at her; her hands in his were sending a warm thrill to his heart. He was thinking that he had never kissed her.
“On the ship coming out,” he said quite inconsequentially, “there was a girl, and I kissed her. Claire, I’ve never kissed you.”
“Have you wanted to?” she asked. “Oh, Jack, let’s talk sense first.”
Her little cry was instinctive for his arms were nearly round her. He drew back at once. “All right,” he agreed. “Let’s talk sense as you say. Sit down again, Claire. You were sitting when I first saw you.”
“Alice——” Claire began.
Jack laughed, taking her hand again, pulling her down on the grass beside him. “Miss Burke,” he explained, “is a jolly good sort, and she knows all about us. As a matter of fact she sent me to find you. She won’t expect us back for hours.”
“I can’t understand,” said Claire. She swung round to look at him. “If I have a lot to tell you, you must have a whole heap to explain to me. Oh, Jack——” She gave a little half-checked laugh. “That you should have come just today. I wasn’t thinking of you, but all the while the wind was singing a song of such utter gladness in my ears.”
He took her into his arms then; it was more than any man could be expected to resist.
“I love you,” he said. “You’ve known that all along. But you haven’t known how much. That’s got to be proved. Now what about this sense we’re going to talk.”
“Yes, tell me,” Claire agreed. She lay close against him, her cheek to his coat, her hands clasped about his hands.
“Well, to begin with,” explained Jack. “I got your letter when I came back to London and it just about finished things for me. I couldn’t stick England. I couldn’t stick London, I couldn’t stick work. Tarleton has a theory that the war left men like me with no moral stamina—if you know what he means. I don’t know anything about that, I just know that your going left an unbearable blank. So I chucked things, and Tarleton, who has always been decent to me, found me a job out here and out I came.”
She stirred in his arms and he bent and kissed her again.
“You loved me, didn’t you?” he asked. “Even that day in your flat.”
“I think so,” she whispered. “But Jack . . .”
He stopped her quickly. The past was too dangerous for any hand to touch. He turned his back on it. “When are you going to marry me?” he said.
She freed herself just a little, sitting away from him, her hands round her knees again. She was remembering. Would there always be memories that hurt? “They are my share,” she thought to herself, “for the thing that I did that was wrong.” “Love that is as cruel as death,” Madelaine had said that; and “Because I thought you loved me, I killed her.” Denis’s words, the agony in Denis’s eyes.
These things belonged to her past, they had nothing to do with Jack. She must take care their shadows did not reach him.
She turned to look at him.
“Do you want to marry me now?” she asked. “Are you sure?!”—-her voice faltered—“I’ve been through black waters since I saw you last, Jack.”
He took her hands and kissed them. “My dear, I know,” he said. “I’d have given my life to keep them from you. But you wouldn’t let me try, would you?”
“I couldn’t,” she answered. “We do things, Jack, without thinking much about them, and then we have to pay for them. I think I’ve paid. If you don’t mind that—if you still love me enough to want me—I’ll marry you, dear, when you like.”
“Then it will be tomorrow,” Jack said with grave triumph. “And I don’t mind what Miss Burke says.”
He stood up, drawing her to her feet. “The paying that you spoke of, it’s finished, isn’t it, Claire? Let the wind carry the past away. See—face it with me.”
He swung her round, holding her in his arms, his face against hers.
“That’s the future out there,” he whispered. “Look at the wind chasing the shadows away. It’s all sunshine, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she answered against his heart. “It’s all sunshine down there, Jack.”
“Then come on.” He laughed gaily, and put her down on her feet and caught her hands. “We’ll walk into it hand in hand, and ask Miss Burke for her blessing. She’ll be very worried about it being tomorrow. She hates being unexpectedly hurried, does Miss Burke.”
Tarleton read of the marriage in London. Jack sent him a little cutting out of the East African Standard and a letter of explanation.
You’ll see she was married under the name of Johnston [he wrote]. That seemed to all of us the best thing to do. He was known by that name out here and by none other. And, Tarleton, she thinks he died out there at Ndogo. Miss Burke says that you know that was what was agreed on, between herself and Tremayne. Claire need never know the truth now. I suppose the whole wretched business will be as well forgotten as these crimes are by the time we come home. That won’t be for another two years. I like the life out here; I’m jolly grateful to you for putting me on to it. I often wonder in respect to Claire, just how grateful I ought to be to you, for you must have known she was here when you suggested my coming. You must have known how her marriage with Tremayne was going to end. I’m glad I didn’t know. I think the horror of it would have driven me mad. Does work still hold you, drive you? Or are you thinking of retiring and settling down? If ever you want a change, remember us out here. We’d love to see you.
Tarleton read the letter and smiled grimly. There was another poor devil done for, caught in the toils of matrimony. The little cutting from the East African Standard he pasted into his Press-cutting book. It was a book of grim records and, ironically, Tarleton saw to it that that marriage announcement came next to the brief record of the end of the Tremayne case.
Justice! Was there really such a thing in this queerly constituted world? Was it not rather a pathetic, disfigured ideal evolved in man’s brain? Tremayne had said to him on the way home, for in some odd way the two men had been friends: “Don’t ever think, Tarleton, that I shall mind dying. I realize the justice of my fate.”
Had he realized it really? If so, he was nearer a sense of satisfaction than Tarleton—with all his rigid service in the cause of justice—had ever been.
Idly viewing those two briefly-printed records, Tarleton’s mind went back over the case. He had, from the first, suspected Tremayne. Seeing Claire, plying her with questions, catching the eager innuendo in the servant’s stories, these things had led him to suspect. And then he had seen Tremayne and he had known. A man, hard driven by passion; that was how he had described Tremayne to himself.
“If a man falls in love after he is forty, his sanity goes west.” That was one of Tarleton’s favourite theories. Remembering it, he had sat down and watched Tremayne. But he had had to go slowly. Where justice was concerned one could not act on surmise, one had to have facts. And then, that ridiculous creature Nathaniel Harvey had butted in with his mare’s nest about Mrs. Tremayne’s brother who had had such a strong motive of hate and fancied wrong. Tarleton had had to stand aside there, still waiting, still watching, like a cat, he thought, watches a mouse.
He shrugged his shoulders and shut the record-book with a snap. In the end he had proved himself right; he nearly always did, and Tremayne had realized the justice of it, had been glad, so Tarleton concluded, to finish with it all.
“The girl never loved him,” thought Tarleton morosely. “He found that out, I suppose, poor devil; life tasted pretty bitter in his mouth.”
Was that God’s or Fate’s idea of justice, he wondered, or did all these things, man’s pitiful, futile wrong-doing, his transgressions, his atonements, lie outside the scope of God’s interest? the queer words of some old hymn stirred in Tarleton’s mind.
For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
Oddly enough, for all his grimness, for all his intense eagerness over justice as displayed by law and order, Tarleton, in his brief, scarcely-acknowledged thoughts of a Deity, always imagined Him like that. Someone outside justice with a heart most wonderfully kind. Someone who could understand and condone as here man’s justice cannot do.
As for the rest, was he retiring? He had said something about it to the chief the very day before he got Jack’s letter, and the chief had smilingly shaken his head.
“What’s the idea, Tarleton?” he had asked. “A cottage in the country, sweet-scented flowers, the simple life, to oust the memories of debased criminals and stuffy law courts?”
“Something like that,” Tarleton had assented, refusing to be amused.
“Well, of course, if you insist,” the chief had assented. “But leave it a day or two and see, Tarleton. I am loath to accept your resignation, and that’s a fact. We can’t afford to lose a man like you.”
So Tarleton was waiting, but his mind was made up. Almost! It need not necessarily be a country cottage and sweet-scented flowers, he thought it was more likely to be a trip round the world. Sight-seeing, strange old lands, new towns!
Across his half-formed picture of the life that would be his, the telephone bell rang. Tarleton cocked his head to listen and let it ring twice before he answered.
“Is that you, Tarleton?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’ve got a case here, just come through from the provinces. Leicester. Seems to have defeated them altogether. An old man found murdered. They are asking for you. Will you take it on?”
Have you seen a cat’s sleepy eyes galvanized into sudden life and interest by the swift passing of a mouse? Have you seen an old hunting dog whose nose is assailed unexpectedly by some familiar scent of the hunted? So it was with Tarleton.
It was as though wires stiffened in his brain, driving out the soft, brooding thoughts of the past half-hour.
“Yes,” he said curtly, “I’ll be round in half an hour for the details. Have everything ready.”
He hung up the telephone receiver and stood looking round. His eyes, grey-blue like steel, twinkled at his own expense.
“I’m an ass,” said Tarleton, “or very nearly was. While there’s life there’s work for me at least. And after all, justice is justice. One’s got to see it carried through.”