by Jane Arbor
Her blue eyes held his. “Cable’?” she echoed. “Mrs. Smith told you that as well, then? That I had come from abroad?”
Again Richard looked casually out of the window. “Yes. She gathered from something you said that it was South Africa—Cape Town.” He sensed that the girl had started slightly and in order to give her time to recover herself if necessary he went on quickly: “As a matter of fact, when I began questioning your good landlady I particularly wanted—for my medical satisfaction—some information which of course she wasn’t able to give me. I believe that this pneumonia of yours was a complication on home other illness you had had recently. Have you had anything which might have led up to it—measles perhaps, even mumps? Something from which you didn’t give yourself proper time to recover?”
He had put her at her ease again and she said frankly: “No, Doctor, nothing like that. Only ’flu—I caught it at the beginning of the last week of the voyage. I did come from South Africa, you know.”
“I see. You had ’flu badly?”
“Rather, I think. But I had a job on board—I had to carry on as well as I could. I was acting as nurse to two children in consideration for my passage money. I didn’t come here—to Fallsbridge—until a few days after we landed and I thought I had got over the ’flu—”
“This place was your objective all the while? You didn’t just happen to arrive here before you were taken ill?”
The girl’s voice was tense as she answered: “Yes. I meant to come here all the while. I had to come here. I had to work my passage in order to come. But I had to do it.”
Richard looked at her and his voice was kind as he said: “You had friends here, perhaps? If so, Matron will be able to put you in touch with them. Would you like her to do anything about it?”
“No. I haven’t friends here. Only an—acquaintance—a man I used to know in Cape Town. He—wouldn’t be interested.”
There was a pause. Richard was thinking: “How long can I keep up this fiction that I’m prying into her personal affairs simply for the sake of ‘hospital records’? Sooner or later I’m going to have to drop it and ask her just what is her concern with Bradd—and with Lysbet.”
Acting upon a sudden decision, he bent forward to lay a hand reassuringly on the girl’s thin wrist. “Look here,” he said, “I won’t go on pretending to be entirely professional, or even to be digging out some entries for ward-sister’s case book. I’m going to be personal—blatantly so. If you don’t like it you can tell me to go to hell—or words to that effect? But if I can help you I want to—I mean to. Will you meet me halfway?”
She did not look at him but seemed preoccupied with pleating the hem of her bed jacket between her fingers. At last she said slowly: “I wasn’t very discreet with Mrs. Smith. But I didn’t know I was going to be ill again. She told you the questions I had asked?”
“Yes,” admitted Richard. “I know—though no one else does—that you came to Fallsbridge, meaning to get in touch with a Mr. Bradd. You were taken ill before you had time to do anything about it, but I’ve guessed, from things you have said while you were ill and weren’t yourself, that Bradd, whom I know, is more than an ‘acquaintance’ to you. Am I right?”
Alarm flashed into her eyes. “What—what did I say?”
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing that will go any further. Would it help, to tell me all about it—or not? I don’t want to press you, but I might be able to do something about it.”
Elsa Geraint looked at him gratefully. “Thank you, I don’t suppose you can help me, but I don’t know what I’m going to do when I’m well enough to leave here. You see, I came over with very little money. I thought that I had only to get to Eliot—to Mr. Bradd—and everything would be all right.” She hesitated. “At least—I think I set out believing that, though I must really have known that something was awfully wrong when he hadn’t written during all these months. Just that one cable—and then nothing.”
Richard said: “Don’t worry about the future. If you want to, tell me about yourself and Bradd. But first I think I ought to tell you that I know your Eliot Bradd very well indeed—”
“Then you know the girl Lysbet Marlowe—the one he cabled about—the one Mrs. Smith said he is supposed to be engaged to now! Do you know her?” Her voice was urgent.
“Yes. I know her. She happened to be engaged to me first.”
“Then it’s true! They are engaged?”
“So it’s been announced. My dear—I won’t conceal it from you—your story may mean a lot to me. Will you tell it to me? Please?”
The woman in Elsa could not resist the pleading in his voice. She said quietly: “So. Then we’ve both been hurt. Maybe then, we can help each other.”
“That’s what I believe. Will you tell me everything—from the beginning?”
“Well I suppose it began when I first met Eliot about three years ago, though I dare say it really began earlier than that when I lost my people—my father and mother died within a few months of each other—and I came from up-country to get a job in Cape Town. You see, then I had no one belonging to me; I went as a typist in a diamond-broker’s office, I lived in a hostel and when I met Eliot I was so utterly lonely!
“He used to come into my employer’s office sometimes and he noticed me the very first time. He used to call me ‘Sunny’ because of my hair and he would tease me and bring me flowers. Then one day he asked me to dine with him and because I was more than half in love with him by then, I accepted. And it went on and on from there—”
“You didn’t marry him?” put in Richard.
“No. I thought he would marry me one day—he’d said as much, more than once. I was happy and content to wait for as long as he wanted. You see, I knew he hadn’t much money and—”
“Hadn’t he?” asked Richard. “I think Lysbet Marlowe believes he is a wealthy man.”
Elsa Geraint shook her head. “He was. He could have been. His father was a diamond merchant who left him a fortune. But Eliot likes racing and drink too much. He had very little left when I met him, and after that he lived on his wits and doing commission jobs for brokers. Sometimes he has even lived on me.”
“And you didn’t question it at all? You didn’t wonder how wise—or how foolish—you were in going on trusting that he would marry you one day?” queried Richard gently.
The girl’s head went up in stubborn pride. “No. I didn’t think about it. I—loved him too much. I thought he loved me too, and that was why I was so utterly shocked when one day he said he was coming to England.
“I said without thinking, because I was excited, ‘Oh Elliot, when do we sail?’ And he laughed—he actually laughed!—and he said ‘Sorry, honey, but you’re not coming—this time. Later, maybe, but I’ve got to go alone. Business talk!”
“Well, I couldn’t understand that, so I said, ‘Business? Do you mean you’ve taken a job in England, Elliot? But he said it was a lot more subtle than that and that he had to see some people over here, influential people who could help him and help us, ultimately, to have enough to marry on. But that he had to go alone and leave me behind.
“I begged him to let me come too—I told him I would get a job for myself directly I got here and I shouldn’t be a burden on him—I could even pay my own passage. But he wouldn’t listen nor tell me what he was coming to do, though he looked interested when I said that about my passage. He’d been wondering, he said, whether I could help him with his; he had enough money to enable him to go tourist, but it was rather important that he should travel well. And so I gave him what money I had and he came alone.”
She stopped speaking as if she had come to the end of her story, and after a pause Richard prompted gently: “And you say you didn’t hear from him?”
“No, not at all. Not even a p-picture postcard.” The brave effort at humour broke upon a half-hysterical note and Richard saw her instantly for what she was—the convalescent patient in his care.
“Don’t go on if you are tir
ed,” he urged. “Nor need you tell me any more if you would rather not.”
But she ignored him and went on: “There was nothing—until the cable.”
“Yes, you mentioned that Do you want to tell me what it said?”
“Yes. It didn’t say anything I hoped it would—I think I’d given up expecting it to. Instead it listed some information that I had to get for him and cable back, without worrying about the length or the cost of the message. I didn’t understand why he could possibly want to know what he did, but I obtained it all and cabled it back as he said.”
“What was it?” Richard’s interest was rising steadily. Without knowing what it was that he sought he believed that he was already upon the track of the mystery of Eliot Bradd.
“It was the details of a will.”
“Of a will? Whose?”
“The will of a man named Edward Marlowe, who died in Cape Town in 1946.” The girl’s voice was flat, as if she were repeating a lesson she had learnt. “I had to cable to Eliot the provisions in it—not the minor ones, just the principal ones, he said.”
“But where did you go for it? How did you get hold of it?” asked Richard.
“Eliot told me how. I had to apply to the office of the Master of the Supreme Court, Cape Provincial Division, and pay a fee to examine the will.”
“And do you remember what it contained? What the details were that you cabled back to Bradd?”
A puzzle line appeared between her brows. “Do you know, I can’t really remember much about it. I thought then that it was just something technical—part of some business over here that he was investigating for someone. But since I went to Mrs. Smith’s and she talked about Miss Marlowe and told me that—that she and Eliot were engaged, I’ve tried to remember all the details. Because, you see, I do remember that this Mr. Marlowe in his will left all his money—all his investments and things were listed—to his daughter—her Christian name could have been Lysbet, but I’m not sure about that. I wish I could remember.”
“But it was because you remembered so far that you told Mrs. Smith you believed Lysbet was wealthy?” asked Richard.
“Yes. I said I thought she must be—”
“But she isn’t you know,” said Richard gently. “She hasn’t any money of her own. She has always been dependent on her aunt, a Mrs. Tempest. She and her uncle were Lysbet’s guardians when she was a child.”
Elsa shook her head in stubborn conviction. “No. The money was left in trust with someone for this girl. But it was all left to her—I do remember that. There were some conditions attached to it but I don’t remember what they were. And it all seems hazier still, since I was ill—”
“Yes, of course. Don’t worry your head about it,” urged Richard. Although he was disappointed to have learned so much and no more of Eliot’s character and activities he felt that his mind had enough to digest for the moment. “Let’s go back to yourself,” he said to Elsa. “Why did you come over here?”
“To find Eliot. Because I thought my letters couldn’t have been reaching him. At first I had sent them c/o G.P.O. London, and after his cable I sent them c/o the Post Office here, because that was where I had sent the return cable. And at last I couldn’t bear it any longer. I couldn’t afford my passage by that time but when I saw a job advertised as nurse to some children on the voyage—I jumped at the chance. And that’s all. You know the rest, Doctor Guyse.”
Again there was silence until Richard said: “Well, I haven’t much to contribute, I’m afraid. Eliot Bradd came to Fallsbridge posing as a wealthy man and claiming, rightly enough I think, that his father and Lysbet’s—the Edward Marlowe of the will—had been partners and that he himself remembered Lysbet when she was a baby. He has stayed off and on at Falcons ever since, and though he was supposed to have some vague ‘business’ on hand, I never heard that he came to England with any other purpose than of looking up Lysbet and her guardian, Mrs. Tempest. Lysbet and I were engaged soon after he arrived and it wasn’t until she and I parted over a stupid quarrel that it was announced she had become engaged to Bradd. I didn’t understand it. I don’t yet. Though from what you’ve told me I think I can see a glimmer—”
But Elsa Geraint was looking deeply puzzled. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “Why did you have to wait for me to enable you to see a ‘glimmer’? Your—Lysbet could have explained to you why she was about to engage herself to another man! Did you not ask her?”
Richard shook his head. “I haven’t seen her again:”
“Not—not at all?”
“No.”
“And you let her go, on what you say yourself was only a ‘stupid’ quarrel? Never went to her again—to ask forgiveness, to offer yourself again, to beg her to come back to you? Could you ever have loved her at all?”
“I loved her with all my heart, with everything in me. I still do,” declared Richard passionately.
“Then why?”
He gestured hopelessly. “Pride, I think. A stupid, over-weening pride. And when I came to my senses it was already too late.”
“‘Too late!’! As if it is ever too late—when you love!” Before her scorn Richard felt suddenly humbled. For this girl believing, rightly or wrongly, that ‘love conquereth all things’ had acted upon her belief to bring her where she was that day. Neither reason nor prudence had prompted her to follow a worthless man across the world, but simply—love.
He said softly using her Christian name in real friendship: “You’re right, Elsa. I thought I understood loyalty, but you know more about it than I can ever know!”
“I only say what I believe,” Elsa told him simply.
“You act upon it too. That’s real belief, however misguided. Tell me, if, through anything further I can learn about the real reason for Eliot having asked Lysbet to marry him, Lysbet comes back to me, what will you do—about Eliot, I mean?”
The girl’s head went up in the same proud gesture as before.
“I followed him here for my own sake. Now, if he wants me, if I can do him any service, I will go wherever he goes.”
Richard looked at her in infinite pity. “And if he destroys you in the end—as such men must?”
“I shall know what it is to love. I shall have lived,” said Elsa Geraint.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
That night, when his work was finished and he was alone in his study, Richard let the fire go out and sat for a long time, staring unseeingly at the feathery ashes in the grate as he tried to unravel the twisted tangle which Elsa’s story had presented to him.
What were the facts? Lysbet—like everyone else in Fallsbridge—must think that Eliot was a rich man. And, if Elsa were to be believed, he was nothing of the sort. He was a playboy, living by gambling and by his wits—nothing more.
But Eliot, for his part, must have come to England believing that Lysbet was wealthy. And Richard judged that he might have been surprised, taken back a little, to find the conditions of life at Falcons, where the girl, though fully indulged by her aunt, was still very consciously a ‘poor relation’.
So Eliot had stayed on as casual guest, paying no particular suit to Lysbet, merely enjoying Mrs. Tempest’s hospitality. Then things began to happen ... Richard and Lysbet got engaged; Mrs. Tempest began to look harassed and ill, so Lysbet said, and Eliot had cabled to Elsa in South Africa.
The answer to that cable, according to Elsa, had confirmed what no one else in Fallsbridge (except, crept the doubt in Richard’s mind, Mrs. Tempest?) had ever guessed—that Lysbet was indeed heiress to a considerable fortune left to her by her father.
But what had happened after that? Nothing, apparently. Whatever his purpose in sending that cable, as far as Richard knew, Eliot had not acted upon it. He had continued to be his suave, nonchalant self and had gone on staying at Falcons seemingly without question from his hostess. And then—far too swiftly upon the breaking of Richard’s own engagement to Lysbet—there had been that announcement in the papers...
At
this point Richard found himself up against a blank wall of frustration. His thoughts beat fruitlessly against it. It simply stood, rock-fast, in the path to clarity and reason.
Why had Lysbet done it? How had Mrs. Tempest permitted her to do a thing in such arrant bad taste, if no worse? Why, even if Lysbet could not bring herself to face Richard, had not Mrs. Tempest—or Eliot, if he were a man at all!—come to him to explain everything?
There was something still which he did not know. There had been, said Elsa, ‘conditions’ attached to Lysbet’s inheritance. Slowly, that earlier flash of doubt began to take shape in Richard’s mind. Was it possible that it was Mrs. Tempest who held the clue to the whole tangled affair? What might she know and have withheld, even from Lysbet, of those ‘conditions’ of the will?
Again Richard found himself completely baffled. Lysbet was of age; surely, if there really were an inheritance for her she would be mistress of it now? Unless—
Richard sat up suddenly, saw the grey ashes before him with astonishing clarity for the first time, and knew, as with a diagnosis which had long escaped him, that he was on the track of the truth at last.
He stood up, thrust into a pocket the pipe which had been ‘dead’ for an hour or more and pulled down the edges of his jacket with his casual characteristically decisive gesture.
Tomorrow, he, too, would be sending a cable of inquiry...
The winter was turning the corner into the New Year to the tune of lashing south-easterly gales, bringing an icy rain which later turned to snow. It spread across the stretches of common land between Falcons and the top of Enshaw Hill like a white, gently ruffled blanket and Falcons, beneath its cloak, seemed to wear a new, aloof dignity which belied the gathering storm of conflict which was going on within.
Lysbet, walking each morning to the cold, unnatural light upon the walls of her bedroom, felt oddly grateful for the snow. Until it passed, she believed without any reasonable foundation, she was safe from whatever Eliot might do. For Eliot had gone away on one of the mysterious errands which frequently took him from Falcons, and while the bitter cold held, Lysbet felt that he would not come back. He had said often that he knew he was not going to care for the country in the English winter.