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‘You promised—you gave me your solemn word that if I made you those four payments of a hundred and fifty, you would give me back my letters and the other things—’
‘I know. I know, my dear. Why remind me of my absurd impulsiveness. Forget what has been said—concentrate on the fact that what I say now is … a thou.’
‘You never meant to keep your promise then?’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Until I realised how foolishly impulsive I had been in asking for six hundred when I might have asked for ten.’
‘I see. And so it will go on, you think. You think you will always be able to bleed me—that I shall always be coward enough and fool enough to pay this blackmail?’
‘Hush, my dear child … Hush, hush.’
‘It is blackmail … nothing more or less … You are nothing more or less than a common blackmailer—a blackguard that preys on wretched, foolish women who—’
He held up a hand, unruffled, smiling, yet menacing.
‘My darling child … what an ugly vocabulary you have acquired of late. No, no, no. Let us be polite. Let us not be melodramatic. Let us be quite sensible. Above all, let us not shout … at half-past one in the morning. Besides, we really have nothing more to say to one another, tonight. I feel that. I am very sensitive to such impressions. You require, I feel, time to reflect. Tomorrow—or perhaps next day—when you have thought things over quietly and sensibly, you will send me a good-tempered little message to say that—’
‘No,’ she cried vehemently, forgetting caution. ‘This is the end of it. I will have nothing more to do with you. I knew that you were a scoundrel—an unscrupulous blackguard. I know now that you are a liar and a cheat as well. I will have nothing more to do with you. Do your worst—I don’t care what it is. Nothing could be worse than what I have gone through already.’
‘Worse for yourself, you mean, my little Babs—don’t you? But what about poor hubby? What would poor straight-laced, stick-in-the-mud hubby say, suppose someone were spiteful enough to—’
His suave, sneering voice was silenced abruptly. Mutely, savagely, she had struck him a swinging buffet on the mouth that had jerked his head back and sent him stumbling against the long oak settle at the opposite side of the hall.
‘Damn you, you little devil—you’ll pay for that.’
He stooped to pick up his fallen hat, tossed it on to the settle, and turned then again to her threateningly. She made no attempt to retreat from him as he moved towards her, but stood against the wall beside the door of the dining-room defiantly, one hand behind her.
‘You horrible cad,’ she panted, ‘how dare you even speak of my husband? How dare an evil, hateful thing like you even think of him? Listen … I have done with you. I don’t care what happens. Before you leave this house you shall give me those letters … or I swear to you I will take them from you. Mind … I have warned you … Don’t tempt me too far …’
He eyed her for a moment, calculatingly, from behind his insolent smile.
‘Sorry, eh? Threats, eh? I see. Well—’
He turned, as if to pick up his hat, but swung round again instantly with such treacherous swiftness that she could not elude him. His hand caught her wrist, twisted something from her grasp. He released her again then, stepping back and watching her warily as he laughed derisively.
‘Take care, my dear … take care. That temper of yours will get you into serious trouble if you don’t keep it under. Ugly words are hard enough to bear, but I draw the line at poisoned knives absolutely. I take it that you realise that this interesting little instrument is—or was at one time—poisoned … and that you realised, therefore, that if you had succeeded in giving me a jab with it, as you attempted to do just now … I say, as you attempted to do just now—’
He glanced over his shoulder quickly towards the hall door, then turned back to her again.
‘I thought that door moved. The wind, I suppose. Yes, my dear. You must try to keep that temper of yours under control. Nasty thing, murder, you know—or even attempted murder. You don’t deny, then, that you knew this knife was poisoned—that the slightest prick from it would probably do me in in a few minutes? You understand, don’t you, why I am impressing these facts on you—facts which, I am afraid, it is going to cost you a great deal more than that thou we spoke about just now to induce me to forget … after all. Meanwhile—until that happy termination of a really quite seriously unpleasant incident is reached—I think I shall keep this little plaything as a souvenir. You’ll remember that I have it, won’t you? And what it means? Good-night, my dear. Think over things calmly—take two days to it—three if you don’t feel sensible enough at the end of two—and send me a little message to say that you feel disposed to talk business—not sentiment. Shall we say now—in consideration of the little occurrence just now—two further instalments of two-fifty, eh? Good-night. My love to hubby. Think how nice it will be to have no more secrets from him—to feel that you are really and truly worthy of his love. Sweet dreams …’
He slipped the knife, which he had inserted carefully in its beaded sheath, into an inner pocket, kissed hands to her airily, and went out.
One thing only was clear to Melhuish, as he watched his wife rouse herself after a moment and shut the hall door with elaborate pains to subdue the protest of its stiffness; she must tell him her story unasked—without compulsion—without the least suspicion that he had spied upon the secret which she had chosen to keep from him. The very caution with which, after that display of reckless bravado, she strove to stifle the sound of the door’s shutting was eloquent enough, significant enough. Already, rather than face his discovery of her secret by him, she had resigned herself again to the indignity and misery of purchasing this scoundrel’s silence with regard to it. That alone was certain and definite—she desired … as strongly as that … that he should not know.
In the astonishing impressions which his ears and eyes had conveyed to his brain during those five or six minutes, tortured doubt still writhed hideously. But the fierce words which had followed that furious blow had assured him of one thing at least—not all of her was lost to him. His mind, agile and decisive in all other emergencies and dilemmas of his life, in this, the gravest of them, refused to move, refused to formulate any coherent thought or purpose save that one immediate need. She must not find him spying on her, lurking there in the darkness. He must have time to think, to realise, to recover judgment and balance, before her eyes met his. She had gone into the dining-room, to extinguish the lights there probably. Before she came out again he must reach his bedroom. The third stair up from the drawing-room landing had creaked as he had come down. He must be careful when he came to it.
CHAPTER IV
THE fog had grown so dense that, glancing across towards Aberdeen Place as he went on towards the pillar-box, Gore could distinguish nothing of the house to which his eyes had turned instinctively save the blurred illumination of its fanlight. Afterwards he recalled sardonically that his imagination had busied itself then for some moments with a charming, enviable picture of the happiness of the man of whose honourable, useful, contenting work that blurred light was the signal. Oddly enough, the figure which came out of the fog to meet him, just as he dropped his letters into the box, proved to be that of the very man of whose felicities, conjugal and otherwise, he had just been thinking.
‘Hallo, doctor,’ he said cheerily. ‘No rest for the wicked then, tonight again?’
‘No.’
‘You getting back now—or just starting out?’
‘Getting back,’ Melhuish replied, as Gore, having turned about, fell into step beside him. ‘A Mrs MacArthur rang me up to go and see her little boy. I’ve been attending him for a mild attack of gastritis. You don’t know the MacArthurs, do you? They’ve only recently come to live here in Linwood.’
‘MacArthur? No. Filthy sort of night, isn’t it? Sort of night I should simply hate to be dragged out of bed if I’d once succeeded in getting there, personally. But I suppose you doctor-men get hardened to it. Why … that’s Cecil Arndale, isn’t it?’
The eyes of both men had converged to a tall figure in a light-coloured raincoat which had emerged hurriedly from a house some twenty yards ahead of them, and, after a quick glance in their direction, had set off at a sharp pace towards the Riverside, growing rapidly indistinct as it receded into the fog.
‘It was Arndale, wasn’t it?’ Melhuish asked abstractedly. ‘His wife’s brother has a flat in one of these houses—Challoner. You probably remember him?’
‘Bertie Challoner? Oh, yes. I remember Bertie very well indeed. An ingenuous youth. Yes. Mrs Arndale told me this evening that he had a flat somewhere along here. Seventy-three, she said, I think.’
The hall door from which Arndale had issued reopened as they reached it, and a large young man emerged from it so hastily that Gore and his companion only escaped collision with his formidable bulk by a fraction of a second. Recognising Melhuish, he laughed shortly and irritably.
‘Hallo, doctor. That you? Where’s that brother-in-law of mine got to? Oh—there he is. Hi! Cecil …’
But Arndale had now reached the end of Selkirk Place and was visible there for a moment in the light of the arc-lamp over the bar, before he turned to his right hand up the lane and disappeared. Bertie Challoner replaced his pipe between his teeth resentfully and turned to regard Melhuish’s companion with an indifferent curiosity which changed abruptly to enthusiasm.
‘Why … Great Scott!’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s—’
He held out expansively an immense hand which Gore, recalling in time the trials of strength of other days, took very cautiously.
‘It is,’ he said. ‘How are you, young fellah?’
‘Fit. Come in and have a little drink. You must. I only heard tonight that you’d come home. I’ve been away for a few days. Come in and have a little drink, doctor, won’t you?’
‘Thanks, no, Challoner. I don’t think so. Good-night. Good-night again, Colonel.’
‘Good-night, doctor.’
Challoner’s gaze followed Melhuish’s retreat for a moment or two before he turned to conduct Gore into his elaborately-equipped bachelor quarters on the ground floor—one of the flats into which Number 73, like many others of the big houses in Selkirk Place, had been divided since the war.
‘Stiff old stick,’ he muttered, with a grimace. ‘Can’t think why Pickles married him. You dined with the Melhuishs tonight, Arndale told me. That’s a comfortable chair. I couldn’t believe Arndale when he told me you had come home. Cigarettes? You look fit. How’s things? Come back for good?’
‘Not sure,’ smiled Gore. ‘England on a night like this is not alluring.’
‘Filthy, isn’t it? Enough to make a chap commit murder or suicide or anything, to look out there into that mouldy Green in a fog like this. You’re staying at the Riverside, I hear. You look fit.’
‘Thank you, Bertie. As that is the second time you have made that remark in sixty seconds, I presume I must regard it as deserved. As a matter of fact, you will be glad to learn, I am perfectly fit.’
Challoner smiled vaguely—indeed he had made no pretence whatever of listening—threw, considering the hour, a surprisingly large quantity of coal on the fire, stirred it noisily, sighed, and subsided into a big chair and a silence which became at length embarrassing. His healthy, brick-red face, good-looking in a rather massive, heavy way, boyish still in repose despite its owner’s thirty years, assumed an expression of gloomy anxiety as its smile faded. Something had occurred to upset Master Bertie Challoner recently, Gore decided. He looked most unmistakably peeved and worried of mind.
‘Look here, my dear chap,’ said the visitor, preparing to take his departure. ‘I’m sure you’re wanting to get down to it, aren’t you? I’ll run in tomorrow morning sometime—’
But Challoner was visibly distressed by this reflection upon his hospitality.
‘Not at all, not at all. I’m simply delighted to see you, Wick—you know I am. Go on—sit down again, old chap. I’m—I’m just a bit worried about something, that’s all. Don’t you bother about me. I shouldn’t turn in for another good hour or so, anyhow. What sort of an evening did you have at the Melhuishs’? Pretty deadly, eh? Old Jimmy Wellmore, I hear—and the gashly Angela. I say, isn’t she a weird old thing? I simply can’t stick her. I’ll swear she drinks or dopes or something.’
‘You have a bad mind, young fellah,’ grinned Gore. ‘You always had. What a shocking thing to think of a lady who—well, she couldn’t be your mother, I suppose, but at any rate she is sufficiently mature to claim your respect.’
Challoner laid aside the extinct pipe which he had been regarding for some moments with intense displeasure, selected another from a crowded rack, and blew into it exhaustively and morosely.
‘I bet the old thing dopes,’ he said doggedly. ‘She’s as yellow as a Chink. Weird old frump … Gets up at three o’clock in the day, Sylvia says, and floats round in a dressing-gown until she goes to bed again, playing with those filthy little yapping dogs of hers—things like that ought to be put into a lethal chamber … How d’you think Pickles looks?’
He replaced the pipe in the rack, lighted a cigarette, and flopped into his chair again disconsolately. ‘This,’ Gore reflected, ‘is a little trying. I must get away before he unburdens his soul. A woman, of course—one of these fair creatures he’s got in a row on his mantelpiece, I suppose.’
Aloud, he said, with decision, ‘Very nice indeed. Quite the nicest person to look at I’ve seen since—well, since I saw her last, I believe. You got a game leg now, old chap?’
Challoner nodded absently.
‘Bit. Had a baddish crash in nineteen-eighteen … What’d you think of Melhuish?’
Now a young man of Bertie Challoner’s type must indeed be disturbed of soul, Gore told himself, if he declined an opportunity of dilating upon a game leg attributable to his share in the greatest of wars. Why this persistent desire to return to the Melhuishs’ and their dinner party?
‘Melhuish? Very nice. Very nice indeed. Not precisely … er … gushing. But a topping good chap, I should say.’
‘Oh, he’s all right, I suppose. Damn supercilious smile. Gets on my nerves. Sort of “You poor unfortunate ass, what are you alive for?” sort of smile. Not that I pretend to be exactly one of your brainy kind. I’m not.’
‘No,’ murmured the guest sympathetically.
‘Still, just because he’s a bit of a dab with a stethoscope, I don’t see that he need treat every one who isn’t as a worm. I bet Pickles often wishes she’d married old Cecil, after all.’
Gore deposited the ash of his cigarette in an ash-tray very, very carefully.
‘Yes?’ he said encouragingly. ‘For a moment it had occurred to me to think of another substitute for her actual choice … Yes?’
‘I suppose you know that Arndale was deadly keen about her, don’t you?’
‘Well, no. I can’t say that I had known that. Though I suppose one may assume fairly safely that most of the young fellahs—and old fellahs, for that matter—in this part of the world—’
‘Oh, yes. But old Arndale went all out for her, you know, until he found he hadn’t a show. He was absolutely silly about her. You ask Sylvia. Sylvia knows jolly well that he only married her because she was such a pal of Pickles’s. It’s a fact. She’ll tell you so herself without a blink. Of course Sylvia’s my sister, and all that—and she and Arndale get on all right, as it has turned out—I mean, everything considered. But if you ask me, if it came to picking Sylvia or Pickles out of the water, tomorrow—well, I bet old Sylvia would feed the fishes.’
Gore smiled pleasantly and still more encouragingly upon this most candid of brothers.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is most interesting. May I ask when this tragedy of unrequited love … came to a head, as it were?’
Challoner considered.
‘When? Oh … it was going on for a couple of years before Arndale married Sylvia. Nineteen-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen … just before the war and during the first year or so of it. I remember Sylvia used to tell me about it in her letters when I went to France first. Both she and Pickles were rather fed up with Cecil because he hadn’t joined up, I remember.’
Gore examined one of his host’s cigarettes critically.
‘These look about eighteen bob a hundred.’
‘A quid,’ said Challoner laconically. His guest sighed enviously and replaced the cigarette in the miniature silver trunk from which he had incautiously taken it.
‘In another, better world, perhaps. In this, not for me. I’ll smoke my old dhudeen, if I may.’
As he filled his pipe his eyes strayed again to the photographs on the mantelpiece—most of them feminine and picturesque, he noted appreciatively—and rested for a moment on that of a pretty if rather dejected-looking young woman in riding-kit which occupied a place of honour.
‘I recognise some old friends among your little picture-gallery,’ he said casually. ‘That’s little Ethel Melville in breeches, isn’t it?—I beg her pardon … Mrs Barrington, I should say. Trying things, breeches, you know, Bertie. Very few of ’em can stand ’em. By the way, I met her husband this evening at the Melhuishs’.’
Challoner’s big flaxen head swung round towards him sharply; his face had flushed a deeper shade of brick-red.
‘Barrington?’
‘Yes. Extraordinary good-looking fellah. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a handsomer man in my life. Comes from Jamaica, doesn’t he?’
‘So he says.’
The visitor surveyed his host’s profile thoughtfully. It was at that moment a profile of remarkable expressiveness.
‘Yes? You think … er … that he doesn’t?’
‘I think,’ said Challoner surlily, ‘that if Barrington says he comes from Jamaica the chances are ten to one he doesn’t. I think that. And I’ll tell you another thing I think about Mr Barrington.’
He had risen to his feet again and was gesturing with a vehement hand.
‘I think he’s a damn scoundrel, Mr Barrington. I know he’s one. I’m not going to tell you how I know it—or just what I know of him. All I say to you is this, Wick—and it’s straight from the horse’s mouth—don’t you be taken in by that smarmy swine. Don’t you have any truck with him, if you can help it. Keep clear of him. I tell you he’s a real rotten bad ’un.’
Challoner’s blue eyes were aglitter with anger now. His big blond head thrust forward, as he spoke, with a threatening belligerence. It was very clearly evident that he disapproved of Mr Barrington for some reason utterly and entirely.
‘What does he do?’ Gore inquired, after a moment. Quite unconsciously his eyes had strayed again to that large photograph which occupied the place of honour in the collection on the mantelpiece. A possible explanation of Master Bertie’s vehement depreciation of Barrington had occurred to him.
‘Do? Nothing. Nobody knows who he is, where he comes from, or anything about him. He was down at Barhams, at the Remount Depot, for a bit during the war—and then he turned up here again afterwards—managed to screw himself into the Arndales’ set somehow. You can see for yourself what a plausible, come-hither sort of swine the beggar is—got to know every one here in Linwood—through the Arndales—got hold of Miss Melville somehow, and persuaded her to marry him—after her money, I needn’t tell you. Though he got a bad drop there … And now … well … there he is—the kind of vermin no decent person would touch with a forty-foot pole if they knew what he really was—and yet, because he’s been clever enough to bluff ’em he’s a pukka sahib—and because he swindled Miss Melville into marrying him … all these silly asses here—people like the Arndales and the Melhuishs and the Wellmores, and so on—they all have him in their houses—allow him to run round with their womenfolk—golf with him, and play bridge with him at the club—and other little games afterwards—at his house. I could tell you a thing or two about that little sideline of his … If he asks you to drop in one night at Hatfield Place for a little game, Wick, my boy … you just go home to bed. You’ll find it cheaper.’
‘Dear me,’ sighed Gore, ‘I do hope that if I ever have a wife, no bad-minded young man will fall in love with her.’
Challoner flushed again—a fine, deep warm crimson, this time. Touched.
‘You think I’m piling it on, Wick, because I don’t like the chap.’
‘Great Heavens, no.’
‘Yes, you do. I can see you do. But by God I’ll, tell you this much—if you knew what I know about Barrington—if he had tried to do to you what he has tried to do to me—if you had even an idea of the kind of blackguard that fellow is—you’d take a chance and do him in. I’m not joking. I’m not joking, Wick. I give you my solemn word—if I had the chance now, this moment, to blot him out—safely—to rid that dear little girl whose life with him is—’
He broke off abruptly, let the big clenched hand which he had shaken angrily, drop to his side, walked to the door of the room and came back.
‘I’m talking a lot, old chap,’ he said, with an unsuccessful attempt at a smile. ‘Too much. I know what I’ve said won’t go beyond you. It isn’t that I should be afraid to say anything I’ve said to you now to Barrington’s face any time—if it was merely a question of thinking of myself. But … he’d take it out of other people—if he heard. Just wash out what I’ve said. I’m a bit on the raw edge tonight.’
Gore rose.
‘I believe you’ve known me for some little time, young fellah,’ he said with mild reproach. ‘Now, get to bed. You’ve been thinking too much, young Bertie. You were never meant for that sort of thing. Night-night.’
Challoner eyed him moodily for a moment.
‘Well, I’m damn glad to see you again, anyhow,’ he said at length. ‘I’ll walk down to the end of the road with you.’
They sauntered down Selkirk Place in the fog, arranging a morning’s golf. Challoner’s two-seater had gone into dock that afternoon with a big-end gone, he explained; but any of the boys would run them out the three miles to Flax ways.
‘Thursday, then. I’ll pick you up at the Riverside. There—’ He took a hand from a trousers-pocket to wave it resentfully towards the red-brick building in front of them. ‘Just to give you an idea of the sort of swine Barrington is. There’s a little girl who looks after that bar down there. You may have seen her about the Riverside … Rather a pretty little thing—?’
‘Miss Rodney?’
‘Yes. That’s her name. Betty Rodney. Brains of a chicken, but not a bad little thing if chaps like Barrington would leave her alone. Well … mind, this is quite between ourselves. I just happen to know. He has got that poor little kid into trouble. That’s the sort of cur he is. I used to notice him hanging about round here late at night … I noticed his car first. He used to leave it just about here—I wondered what the devil he was up to at first, until one night, about a month ago, I heard him whistling up at her window. She sleeps over the bar, you see. And she came to that side-door and let him in. Silly little idiot. I believe she was to have been married to some chap or other, before Barrington came along and cut in. Now—well, I expect that’s off now. Suppose they’ll fire her from the Riverside, too, when they find out.’
‘Oh,’ said Gore, ‘so that’s the sort of gentleman Mr Barrington is. That’s very interesting. You’re quite sure about this girl, Bertie?’
Challoner laughed impatiently.
‘Sure? I bet she’s expecting him now. That’s her window where the light is. It’s always lighted up the nights he comes along.’ He laughed sardonically. ‘Though she won’t see him tonight, I fancy. Oh, yes. I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on Mr Barrington lately. I know what I’m talking about. Look here. If you don’t believe me—I’ll whistle under that window now. You’ll see what happens. I know what I’m talking about, believe me.’