“Even I haven’t the nerve to imagine that I can work a miracle in the few hours before the train leaves to-morrow. I must just make the best of it. If we ever meet again—and I don’t see why we should—you will be married. My particular brand of mental suggestion doesn’t work at long range. I shan’t hope to influence you by telepathy.”
He leaned on the balustrade at her side and spoke in a low, level voice.
“This thing,” he said, “coming as a shock, coming out of the blue sky without warning—Meredith is the last man in the world you would expect to crack up; he looked as fit as a dray horse the last time I saw him—somehow seems to have hammered a certain amount of sense into me. Odd it never struck me before; but I suppose I have been about the most bumptious, conceited fool that ever happened.
“Why I should have imagined that there was a sort of irresistible fascination in me, which was bound to make you break off your engagement and upset the whole universe simply to win the wonderful reward of marrying me, is more than I can understand. I suppose it takes a shock to make a fellow see exactly what he really amounts to. I couldn’t think any more of you than I do; but, if I could, the way you have put up with my mouthing and swaggering and posing as a sort of superman, would make me do it. You have been wonderful!”
Aline could not speak. She felt as though her whole world had been turned upside down in the last quarter of an hour. This was a new George Emerson, a George at whom it was impossible to laugh, but an insidiously attractive George. Her heart beat quickly. Her mind was not clear; but dimly she realized that he had pulled down her chief barrier of defense and that she was more open to attack than she had ever been. Obstinacy, the automatic desire to resist the pressure of a will that attempted to overcome her own, had kept her cool and level-headed in the past. With masterfulness she had been able to cope. Humility was another thing altogether.
Soft-heartedness was Aline’s weakness. She had never clearly recognized it, but it had been partly pity that had induced her to accept Freddie; he had seemed so downtrodden and sorry for himself during those Autumn days when they had first met. Prudence warned her that strange things might happen if once she allowed herself to pity George Emerson.
The silence lengthened. Aline could find nothing to say. In her present mood there was danger in speech.
“We have known each other so long,” said Emerson, “and I have told you so often that I love you, we have come to make almost a joke of it, as though we were playing some game. It just happens that that is our way—to laugh at things; but I am going to say it once again, even though it has come to be a sort of catch phrase. I love you! I’m reconciled to the fact that I am done for, out of the running, and that you are going to marry somebody else; but I am not going to stop loving you.
“It isn’t a question of whether I should be happier if I forgot you. I can’t do it. It’s just an impossibility—and that’s all there is to it. Whatever I may be to you, you are part of me, and you always will be part of me. I might just as well try to go on living without breathing as living without loving you.”
He stopped and straightened himself.
“That’s all! I don’t want to spoil a perfectly good Spring afternoon for you by pulling out the tragic stop. I had to say all that; but it’s the last time. It shan’t occur again. There will be no tragedy when I step into the train to-morrow. Is there any chance that you might come and see me off?”
Aline nodded.
“You will? That will be splendid! Now I’ll go and pack and break it to my host that I must leave him. I expect, it will be news to him to learn that I am here. I doubt if he knows me by sight.”
Aline stood where he had left her, leaning on the balustrade. In the fullness of time there came to her the recollection she had promised Freddie that shortly after luncheon she would sit with him.
* * *
The Honorable Freddie, draped in purple pyjamas and propped up with many pillows, was lying in bed, reading Gridley Quayle, Investigator. Aline’s entrance occurred at a peculiarly poignant moment in the story and gave him a feeling of having been brought violently to earth from a flight in the clouds. It is not often an author has the good fortune to grip a reader as the author of Gridley Quayle gripped Freddie.
One of the results of his absorbed mood was that he greeted Aline with a stare of an even glassier quality than usual. His eyes were by nature a trifle prominent; and to Aline, in the overstrung condition in which her talk with George Emerson had left her, they seemed to bulge at her like a snail’s. A man seldom looks his best in bed, and to Aline, seeing him for the first time at this disadvantage, the Honorable Freddie seemed quite repulsive. It was with a feeling of positive panic that she wondered whether he would want her to kiss him.
Freddie made no such demand. He was not one of your demonstrative lovers. He contented himself with rolling over in bed and dropping his lower jaw.
“Hello, Aline!”
Aline sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Well, Freddie?”
Her betrothed improved his appearance a little by hitching up his jaw. As though feeling that would be too extreme a measure, he did not close his mouth altogether; but he diminished the abyss. The Honorable Freddie belonged to the class of persons who move through life with their mouths always restfully open.
It seemed to Aline that on this particular afternoon a strange dumbness had descended on her. She had been unable to speak to George and now she could not think of anything to say to Freddie. She looked at him and he looked at her; and the clock on the mantel-piece went on ticking.
“It was that bally cat of Aunt Ann’s,” said Freddie at length, essaying light conversation. “It came legging it up the stairs and I took the most frightful toss. I hate cats! Do you hate cats? I knew a fellow in London who couldn’t stand cats.”
Aline began to wonder whether there was not something permanently wrong with her organs of speech. It should have been a simple matter to develop the cat theme, but she found herself unable to do so. Her mind was concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, on the repellent nature of the spectacle provided by her loved one in pyjamas. Freddie resumed the conversation.
“I was just reading a corking book. Have you ever read these things? They come out every month, and they’re corking. The fellow who writes them must be a corker. It beats me how he thinks of these things. They are about a detective—a chap called Gridley Quayle. Frightfully exciting!”
An obvious remedy for dumbness struck Aline.
“Shall I read to you, Freddie?”
“Right-ho! Good scheme! I’ve got to the top of this page.”
Aline took the paper-covered book.
“‘Seven guns covered him with deadly precision.’ Did you get as far as that?”
“Yes; just beyond. It’s a bit thick, don’t you know! This chappie Quayle has been trapped in a lonely house, thinking he was going to see a pal in distress; and instead of the pal there pop out a whole squad of masked blighters with guns. I don’t see how he’s going to get out of it, myself; but I’ll bet he does. He’s a corker!”
If anybody could have pitied Aline more than she pitied herself, as she waded through the adventures of Mr. Quayle, it would have been Ashe Marson. He had writhed as he wrote the words and she writhed as she read them. The Honorable Freddie also writhed, but with tense excitement.
“What’s the matter? Don’t stop!” he cried as Aline’s voice ceased.
“I’m getting hoarse, Freddie.”
Freddie hesitated. The desire to remain on the trail with Gridley struggled with rudimentary politeness.
“How would it be—Would you mind if I just took a look at the rest of it myself? We could talk afterward, you know. I shan’t be long.”
“Of course! Do read if you want to. But do you really like this sort of thing, Freddie?”
“Me? Rather! Why—don’t you?”
“I don’t know. It seems a little—I don’t know.”
Freddie had become absorbed in his story. Aline did not attempt further analysis of her attitude toward Mr. Quayle; she relapsed into silence.
It was a silence pregnant with thought. For the first time in their relations, she was trying to visualize to herself exactly what marriage with this young man would mean. Hitherto, it struck her, she had really seen so little of Freddie that she had scarcely had a chance of examining him. In the crowded world outside he had always seemed a tolerable enough person. To-day, somehow, he was different. Everything was different to-day.
This, she took it, was a fair sample of what she might expect after marriage. Marriage meant—to come to essentials—that two people were very often and for lengthy periods alone together, dependent on each other for mutual entertainment. What exactly would it be like, being alone often and for lengthy periods with Freddie? Well, it would, she assumed, be like this.
“It’s all right,” said Freddie without looking up. “He did get out! He had a bomb on him, and he threatened to drop it and blow the place to pieces unless the blighters let him go. So they cheesed it. I knew he had something up his sleeve.”
Like this! Aline drew a deep breath. It would be like this—forever and ever and ever—until she died. She bent forward and stared at him.
“Freddie,” she said, “do you love me?” There was no reply. “Freddie, do you love me? Am I a part of you? If you hadn’t me would it be like trying to go on living without breathing?”
The Honorable Freddie raised a flushed face and gazed at her with an absent eye.
“Eh? What?” he said. “Do I—Oh; yes, rather! I say, one of the blighters has just loosed a rattlesnake into Gridley Quayle’s bedroom through the transom!”
Aline rose from her seat and left the room softly. The Honorable Freddie read on, unheeding.
* * *
Ashe Marson had not fallen far short of the truth in his estimate of the probable effect on Mr. Peters of the information that his precious scarab had once more been removed by alien hands and was now farther from his grasp than ever. A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance. Success had made Mr. Peters, in certain aspects of his character, a spoiled child.
At the moment when Ashe broke the news he would have parted with half his fortune to recover the scarab. Its recovery had become a point of honor. He saw it as the prize of a contest between his will and that of whatever malignant powers there might be ranged against him in the effort to show him that there were limits to what he could achieve. He felt as he had felt in the old days when people sneaked up on him in Wall Street and tried to loosen his grip on a railroad or a pet stock. He was suffering from that form of paranoia which makes men multimillionaires. Nobody would be foolish enough to become a multimillionaire if it were not for the desire to prove himself irresistible.
Mr. Peters obtained a small relief for his feelings by doubling the existing reward, and Ashe went off in search of Joan, hoping that this new stimulus, acting on their joint brains, might develop inspiration.
“Have any fresh ideas been vouchsafed to you?” he asked. “You may look on me as baffled.”
Joan shook her head.
“Don’t give up,” she urged. “Think again. Try to realize what this means, Mr. Marson. Between us we have lost ten thousand dollars in a single night. I can’t afford it. It is like losing a legacy. I absolutely refuse to give in without an effort and go back to writing duke-and-earl stories for Home Gossip.”
“The prospect of tackling Gridley Quayle again—”
“Why, I was forgetting that you were a writer of detective stories. You ought to be able to solve this mystery in a moment. Ask yourself, ‘What would Gridley Quayle have done?’”
“I can answer that. Gridley Quayle would have waited helplessly for some coincidence to happen to help him out.”
“Had he no methods?”
“He was full of methods; but they never led him anywhere without the coincidence. However, we might try to figure it out. What time did you get to the museum?”
“One o’clock.”
“And you found the scarab gone. What does that suggest to you?”
“Nothing. What does it suggest to you?”
“Absolutely nothing. Let us try again. Whoever took the scarab must have had special information that Peters was offering the reward.”
“Then why hasn’t he been to Mr. Peters and claimed it?”
“True! That would seem to be a flaw in the reasoning. Once again: Whoever took it must have been in urgent and immediate need of money.”
“And how are we to find out who was in urgent and immediate need of money?”
“Exactly! How indeed?”
There was a pause.
“I should think your Mr. Quayle must have been a great comfort to his clients, wasn’t he?” said Joan.
“Inductive reasoning, I admit, seems to have fallen down to a certain extent,” said Ashe. “We must wait for the coincidence. I have a feeling that it will come.” He paused. “I am very fortunate in the way of coincidences.”
“Are you?”
Ashe looked about him and was relieved to find that they appeared to be out of earshot of their species. It was not easy to achieve this position at the castle if you happened to be there as a domestic servant. The space provided for the ladies and gentlemen attached to the guests was limited, and it was rarely that you could enjoy a stroll without bumping into a maid, a valet or a footman; but now they appeared to be alone. The drive leading to the back regions of the castle was empty. As far as the eye could reach there were no signs of servants—upper or lower. Nevertheless, Ashe lowered his voice.
“Was it not a strange coincidence,” he said, “that you should have come into my life at all?”
“Not very,” said Joan prosaically. “It was quite likely that we should meet sooner or later, as we lived on different floors of the same house.”
“It was a coincidence that you should have taken that room.”
“Why?”
Ashe felt damped. Logically, no doubt, she was right; but surely she might have helped him out a little in this difficult situation. Surely her woman’s intuition should have told her that a man who has been speaking in a loud and cheerful voice does not lower it to a husky whisper without some reason. The hopelessness of his task began to weigh on him.
Ever since that evening at Market Blandings Station, when he realized that he loved her, he had been trying to find an opportunity to tell her so; and every time they had met, the talk had seemed to be drawn irresistibly into practical and unsentimental channels. And now, when he was doing his best to reason it out that they were twin souls who had been brought together by a destiny it would be foolish to struggle against; when he was trying to convey the impression that fate had designed them for each other—she said, “Why?” It was hard.
He was about to go deeper into the matter when, from the direction of the castle, he perceived the Honorable Freddie’s valet—Mr. Judson—approaching. That it was this repellent young man’s object to break in on them and rob him of his one small chance of inducing Joan to appreciate, as he did, the mysterious workings of Providence as they affected herself and him, was obvious. There was no mistaking the valet’s desire for conversation. He had the air of one brimming over with speech. His wonted indolence was cast aside; and as he drew nearer he positively ran. He was talking before he reached them.
“Miss Simpson, Mr. Marson, it’s true—what I said that night. It’s a fact!”
Ashe regarded the intruder with a malevolent eye. Never fond of Mr. Judson, he looked on him now with positive loathing. It had not been easy for him to work himself up to the point where he could discuss with Joan the mysterious ways of Providence, for there was that about her which made it hard to achieve sentiment. That indefinable something in Joan Valentine which made for nocturnal raids on other people’s museums also rendered her a somewhat difficult person to talk to about twin souls and de
stiny. The qualities that Ashe loved in her—her strength, her capability, her valiant self-sufficingness—were the very qualities which seemed to check him when he tried to tell her that he loved them.
Mr. Judson was still babbling.
“It’s true. There ain’t a doubt of it now. It’s been and happened just as I said that night.”
“What did you say? Which night?” inquired Ashe.
“That night at dinner—the first night you two came here. Don’t you remember me talking about Freddie and the girl he used to write letters to in London—the girl I said was so like you, Miss Simpson? What was her name again? Joan Valentine. That was it. The girl at the theater that Freddie used to send me with letters to pretty nearly every evening. Well, she’s been and done it, same as I told you all that night she was jolly likely to go and do. She’s sticking young Freddie up for his letters, just as he ought to have known she would do if he hadn’t been a young fathead. They’re all alike, these girls—every one of them.”
Mr. Judson paused, subjected the surrounding scenery to a cautious scrutiny and resumed.
“I took a suit of Freddie’s clothes away to brush just now; and happening”—Mr. Judson paused and gave a little cough—“happening to glance at the contents of his pockets I come across a letter. I took a sort of look at it before setting it aside, and it was from a fellow named Jones; and it said that this girl, Valentine, was sticking onto young Freddie’s letters what he’d written her, and would see him blowed if she parted with them under another thousand. And, as I made it out, Freddie had already given her five hundred.
“Where he got it is more than I can understand; but that’s what the letter said. This fellow Jones said he had passed it to her with his own hands; but she wasn’t satisfied, and if she didn’t get the other thousand she was going to bring an action for breach. And now Freddie has given me a note to take to this Jones, who is stopping in Market Blandings.”
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