While the Seraph worked, I had plentiful excuse for playing truant. Decency ordained that after my twenty years’ respite I should spend a certain amount of time with my brother and his wife, and since Sylvia’s edict of banishment, I was the sole channel of communication between Cadogan Square and Adelphi Terrace. It was noticeable—though I say it in no carping spirit—that Philip sought my company a shade less assiduously when I ceased to watch over the welfare of Gladys. Finally, I devoted a portion of each day to Chester Square. Elsie adhered to her decision that the Seraph must be no more seen in company with her in public, and even a private call at the house was impossible so long as his face carried the marks of Sylvia’s resentment.
The burden of the publicity-campaign fell on my shoulders, though it came to be relieved—to his honour be it said!—by Gartside. I gave him my views of Elsie’s behaviour, brought the two of them together at dinner, and left his big, kind heart to do the rest. He responded as I knew he would, and his adhesion to our party was matter of grave offence to Elsie’s detractors, for his name carried more weight with the little-minded than the rest of us put together. Culling enrolled himself for a while, but dropped away as he dropped out of most sustained efforts. Laziness brought about his defection more than want of faith or the pressure of orthodox friends; indeed I am not sure that his strongest motive in joining us was not a passing desire to confound Nigel Rawnsley. In this as in other things, we never treated him seriously; but with Gartside it was different. At a time when Carnforth’s resignation of the Bombay Governorship was in the hands of the India Office—and it was an open secret that Gartside’s name stood high on the list of possible successors—it required some courage to incur the kind of notoriety that without doubt we both of us did incur. He ought to have been lunching with Anglo-Indians and patting the cheeks of Cabinet Ministers’ children, instead of trying to infect Society with his belief in a divorced woman’s innocence.
In the course of the campaign I began to see a little, but only a little, more of Joyce than I had been privileged to do during the time when I was supposed to be watching over the destiny of Gladys. I am not sure that I altogether enjoyed my new liberty of access to her house; it worried me to see how overworked and tired she was beginning to look, though I had the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that nothing I could say or do would check her. She risked her health as recklessly as she had been risking her liberty since the inauguration of the New Militancy. I had to treat her politics like a cold in the head and allow them to run their nine days’ course. Though I saw she was still cumbered with my scarab ring, we never referred to our meeting in Oxford. I am vain enough to think that she did not regard me even at this time with complete disfavour, but I will atone for my vanity by saying I dared do next to nothing to forward my suit. My foothold was altogether too precarious; an attempt to climb higher would only have involved me in a headlong fall.
And yet, before I had been a week at Adelphi Terrace, I made the attempt. Elsie telephoned one evening that she was going out, but would have to leave Joyce who was too tired to face a restaurant and theatre. She would be dining alone; if I had nothing better to do, would I look in for a few minutes and see if I could cheer her up? I had promised to dine with Nigel, but it was a small party and I managed to slip away before ten. Joyce was half asleep when I was shown into the drawing-room; she did not hear me announced, and I was standing within two feet of her before she noticed my presence.
“I’ve run you to earth at last,” I said.
Then I observed a thing that made me absurdly pleased. Joyce was looking very white and tired, with dark rings round the eyes, and under either cheekbone a little hollow that ought not to have been there. When she opened her eyes and saw me, I could swear to a tiny flush of pleasure; the blue eyes brightened, and she smiled as children smile in their sleep.
“Very nearly inside it,” she answered, with a woebegone shake of the head. “Oh, Toby, but I’m so tired! Don’t make me get up.”
I had no thoughts of doing so. Indeed, my mind was solely concerned with the reflection that she had called me Toby; it was the first time.
“What have you been doing to get yourself into this state?” I asked severely.
“Working.”
“There you are!” I said. “Something always happens when people take to work. I shall now read you a short lecture on female stamina.”
“You’re sure you wouldn’t prefer to smoke?”
“I can do both.”
“Oh, that’s not fair.”
Joyce Davenant and Sylvia Roden have only two characteristics in common; one is that I am very fond of both, the other, that I can do nothing with either. I capitulated, and selected a cigarette.
“A live dog’s worth a good many dead lions,” I reminded her as a final shot.
“Are you trying to convince me of the error of my ways?”
“I am not your Suffragan Bishop,” I answered in the tone Robert Spencer adopted in telling a surprised House of Commons that he was not an agricultural labourer.
“I’m so glad. I couldn’t bear an argument tonight.”
The effort she had made on my arrival had spent itself, and I was not at all certain whether I ought to stay.
“Look here,” I said, “if you’re too tired to see me, I’ll go.”
“Please, don’t!” she laid a restraining hand on my sleeve. “I’m all right if you don’t argue or use long words; but I’ve had such a headache the last few days that I haven’t been able to sleep, and now I don’t seem able to fix my attention properly, or remember things.”
I had met these symptoms before; the first time in India with men who were being kept too long at work in the hot weather.
“In other words, you want a long rest.”
She nodded without speaking.
“Why don’t you take it?”
“I simply can’t. I’ve put my hand to the plough, and you know what we are. Obstinate, hard-mouthed brutes, the whole family of us. I’ve got other people to consider, I mustn’t fail them.”
“And the benighted, insignificant people who don’t happen to be your followers? Some of them may cherish a flickering interest in your existence.”
“Oh! they don’t count.”
“Thank you, Joyce.”
She held out a pacifying hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be ungracious. But those women— You know, you get rather attached to people when you’ve spoken and fought and been imprisoned side by side with them. I always feel rather mean; any one of them ’ud die for me, and I’m not at all sure I’d do the same for them. Everything’s been different since Elsie got her freedom; it’s easier to fight for a person than a principle.”
“Are you weakening?”
“Heavens! No! I’m just showing you I should be honour-bound to stand by my fellows even if I lost all faith in the cause. I say, don’t go on smoking cigarettes; ring the bell and make Dick give you a cigar. He’s in the house somewhere. I heard him come in a few minutes ago.”
“I came to see you,” I pointed out.
“But I’m dreadfully poor company tonight.”
“I take you as I find you, in sickness and health, weal and woe—”
“Mr. Merivale!”
Her voice was very stern.
“You remember our wager?” I said, with a shrug of the shoulders.
“It was a joke,” she retorted. “And not in very good taste. Oh, I was as much to blame as you were.”
“But I was quite serious.”
“Did you seriously think I should give up the Cause?”
“I offered very long odds. A twopenny ring—but you remember what they were.”
“Are you any nearer winning?”
“I should like to think so.”
“Because we haven’t answered Mr. Rawnsley’s time-arrangements in the House?”
She nodded significantly. “And they haven’t found their hostages yet.”
“But they’ve paid no ransom.”
“It’s an indurance test.”
I got up to find myself a match. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of her left hand, wearing the scarab-ring; it disappeared for a moment, and to my surprise reappeared without the ring.
“Suppose we call the bet off?” she suggested. “It was all rather silly.”
“Odds offered and taken and horses running. It’s too late now. How did you find out the secret?”
“I didn’t. My finger shrank and the ring came off three days ago when I was washing my hands.”
“You didn’t pull?”
“No.”
“Show me.”
“It was like this,” she began, slipping the ring back on to the third finger. “Rather loose—”
I tightened the couplings before she saw what I was about.
“That’s soon remedied. Come to me when the finger’s nice and plump again, and I’ll let it out.”
A shadow of annoyance crossed her face.
“Now I shall have it cut,” she said.
“You could have had that done three weeks ago. You could have thrown the thing away three days ago. You didn’t do either.”
A smile dimpled its way into her cheeks. “How old are you? Over forty?”
“What a way of looking at things!” I exclaimed. “Marlborough was fifty before he started his campaigns, Wren nearer fifty than forty before ever he put pencil to paper. You don’t know the possibilities of virgin soil.”
“I was wondering how long it was since you left school.”
I got up and dusted the flecks of cigarette ash from my shirt.
“I’m going now,” I said. “It’s time you were in bed. Just one word before I go. You want to win this wager, don’t you? So do I. Well, if you don’t give yourself a holiday, you’re going to break down and lose it.”
Smiling mischievously, she got up and took my proffered hand.
“It’ll be an ill-wind, then—”
“Damn the wager!” I burst out. “I don’t want to win it at that price. Joyce, if I say I’m beaten, will you be a good girl and go to bed and stay there? Win or lose, I can’t bear to see you looking as ill as you are now.”
She shook her head a little sadly. “I can’t take a holiday now.”
“You’ll lose the wager.”
She looked up swiftly into my face, and lowered her eyes.
“I don’t know that I mind that much.”
“Joyce!”
“But I can’t take a holiday,” she repeated.
I opened the door, and on the threshold waved my hand in farewell.
“Won’t you wait till Elsie comes back?” she asked.
“I will wait for no one.”
“But where are you off to?”
I scratched my chin, as one does when one wishes to appear reflective.
“I am going to break the Militant Suffrage Movement.”
“A good many people have failed,” she warned me.
“They never tried.”
“How will you begin?”
I walked downstairs thoughtfully, weighed Dick’s tall hat in the balance, and decided in favour of my own.
“I have no idea,” I called back to the figure at the stair-head.
The Seraph had marked his confidence in me by the bestowal of a latch-key. I let myself in at Adelphi Terrace and wandered round the flat in search of him. He was not in the library or dining-room, but at length I discovered him in pyjamas sitting in the balcony outside his bedroom, and gazing disconsolately out over the river. He knew where I had been before I had time to tell him, and was able to make a fairly accurate guess at the nature of my conversation with Joyce. Perhaps there was nothing very wonderful in that, but it fitted in with the rest of his theory: I remember he summarised her mental condition by saying that a certain sub-conscious idea was coming to be consciously apprehended. It was a cumbrous way of saying that both Joyce and I had made rather an important discovery; what puzzled me then, and puzzles me still, is that at my first meeting with her either of us should have given him grounds for forming any theory at all. Even admitting that I may have been visibly impressed, I could see no response in her; but I have almost given up trying to understand the Seraph’s mind or mode of thought.
“You’ve not got her yet,” he warned me.
“No one knows that better than I do.”
“Her mind’s still very full of her cause.”
“Yes, damn it.”
“Almost as full of it as of you. She’s torn between you, and you’ll have to fight if you want to keep your foothold.”
I told him, as I had told Joyce, that I proposed to break the Suffrage movement.
“How?” he asked.
“I thought you might be able to help. What is going to be the end of it?”
He shook his head moodily, and picked up a cigarette.
“I’m not a prophet.”
“You’ve prophesied to some purpose before now,” I reminded him.
He paused to look at me with the cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in the other.
“Guesswork,” I heard him murmur.
“But it worked out right?”
“Coincidence.”
“You don’t think that.”
“I may think the world’s flat if it amuses me,” he answered, blowing out the match.
The abruptness of his tone was unusual.
“What’s been worrying you, Seraph?” I asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
I lay back in my chair and looked him up and down.
“You’ve forgotten to light your cigarette,” I pointed out. “You’re shaking as if you’d got malaria, and wherever your mind may be, it’s not in this room and it’s not attending to me.”
“I’m sorry,” he apologised, sitting down. “I’m rather tired.”
To belie his words he jumped up again and began pacing feverishly up and down before the open balcony window.
“Let’s hear about it,” I urged.
“You can’t do any good.”
“Let me judge of that.”
He paused irresolutely and stood leaning his head against the frame of the window and looking out at the flaming sky-signs on the far side of the river.
“It won’t do any good,” he repeated over his shoulder. “Nobody ’ud believe you, but—I don’t know, you might try. She must be warned. Sylvia, I mean. She’s absolutely on the brink, and if some one doesn’t save her, she’ll be over. I can’t interfere, I should only precipitate it. Will you go, Toby? She might listen to you. It’s worth getting your face laid open to keep her out of danger. Will you go?”
He turned and faced me, wild-eyed and excited. His lips were white, and his fingers locked and unlocked themselves in uncontrollable nervous restlessness.
“What’s the danger?” I asked, with studied deliberation.
“I don’t know. How should I? But it’s there; will you go?”
“I don’t mind trying,” I answered, taking out my watch.
“You must go now!”
It was a quarter to one, and I told him so. Nobody can be less sensitive than I to the charge of eccentricity, but I refuse to disturb a Cabinet Minister’s household at one in the morning to proclaim that an overstrung nervous visionary has a premonition that peril of a vague undefined order is menacing the daughter of the house.
“We must wait till Christian hours,” I insisted.
“Ah, you don’t believe it; no one does!”
At eleven o’clock next morning—as soon, in fact, as I had drunk my coffee and was comfortably sha
ved and dressed—I drove round to Cadogan Square in search of Sylvia. I had no very clear idea what warning I was to give her when we met; indeed I felt wholly ridiculous and slightly resentful. However, my word had gone forth, and I was indisposed to upset the Seraph by breaking it. I left him in the library, silent and pale, writing hard and accumulating an industrious pile of manuscript against my return. By morning light no trace remained of his overnight excitement.
To my secret relief Sylvia was not in when I arrived. The man believed she was shopping and would be out to luncheon, but if I called again about three I should probably find her at home. It hardly seemed worth my while to return to Adelphi Terrace, so I ordered some cigars, took a turn in the Park, lunched at the Club, and talked mild scandal with Paddy Culling. At three I presented myself once more in Cadogan Square.
The door stood open, and Sylvia appeared in sight as I mounted the steps.
“Worse and worse!” she exclaimed as she gave me a hurried shake of the hand. “I was so sorry to be out when you called this morning. Look here, will you go inside and tell mother you’re coming to dinner tonight.”
“But I’m dining out already.”
“Oh, well, when will you come? Ring up and fix a night. I must simply fly now.”
The Classic Mystery Novel Page 43