“Yes.”
“You and the Spaniard?”
“Yes.”
Corinne could not tell how hard she had struck — or what dreams he had nursed of some fair domain in a tropical land, where he would live at his ease, master of his own house. He had escaped from the The Royale with his little friend Hospel Roussencq. They had forced their way, starving, weaponless, up the infested rivers, through the infested forests to the inland towns of Venezuela — that desperate pilgrimage so often begun, so seldom accomplished. He had worked his passage to Burma, obtained the facts from Maung H’la, which put Corinne into the palm of his hand. He had dealt with Maung H’la in the very spirit of disdain in which Wotan in the opera had dealt with Hunding. A contemptuous wave of the hand and the rogue had fallen dead. He had come back to England, got together a trifle of money, and made his plan. One thing which through the ten years of his imprisonment and his wanderings he had treasured as his heart’s blood was — the latch-key of his house in South Audley Street. He had learnt the lesson of concealment from his fellow-convicts. Now all that ignominy reaped its reward. With the money saved, he could buy the clothes which passed him without question as a likely visitor. The latch-key passed him as a likely lover. And all these long unlovely labouring days ended, he walks according to plan, into his own house to find that every penny of the fortune that was his had been scattered down the wind Corinne could not fathom the shock of despair, unutterable despair which had followed upon the complete ruin of his plans. But his dejection was plain enough, and it relieved her for the moment of that fear, which had chilled her to the marrow of her bones, that she was in the presence of a supernatural agent of evil. As he sat turned to stone, with lowered head, he was human to her now, a human spreading about him some desolating atmosphere of loneliness like — like the Wandering Jew.
“You and Battchilena,” he said.
But the quality of his voice had changed. It was somehow — indefinably — dangerous. His fingers twitched, his hand stretched out a little towards her, and was withdrawn, and stretched out again, hovering. Corinne watched it with a growing horror, as one might watch a poisonous spider of the East. She wrenched her gaze away from it — and he was looking at her, straight in the face, his eyes blazing — a panther crouched for the spring. Just for a second, so surprising had been his abasement, she had been deluded by a sense of victory. But the delusion had gone. She knew that between Corinne living and Corinne dead there was a border-line of no more thickness than a shadow.
“This house?” he asked.
Corinne shook her head.
“Mortgaged.”
“You have jewellery?”
Even here she could give him no good news, herself no excuses.
“A few pieces. Most of the valuable things were sold. Oh!” And unable longer to endure the menace of his looks, she raised her hands and pressed them tight over her face, whilst the tears burst from her afresh. Even to her own ears the tale of her extravagance sounded fatal. Jewellery had been given her — a fortune of it. Jewellery had been bought — oh, with a thriftless hand. But she and Leon had eaten and drunk it, and danced it and gambled it away. If only Battchilena had had money!
“But I will get money for you — I will Only let me live! I swear I will!” and she stretched out her arms to him appealingly.
“How?”
“By dancing. I can make money now. I have offers from America,” and Clutter swept the prayer away with a growl. As if he would let her out of his reach until one way or another she had paid him.
“You have rich friends,” he said at length.
“None who would give me money.”
She might have had. With her grace and her sprightliness and her success, she might have had them by the score. But Battchilena with his scenes of jealousy would have prevented her, even if she had wished for them. And she had not wished for them. She had taken a pride in providing for Battchilena herself. What a fool she had been so to let him fill her thoughts when she occupied so small a space in his!
Archie Clutter broke in upon her bitter regrets.
“There’s the Australian.”
“Lord Culalla?”
“Yes. He’s very rich.”
“He has not spoken to me for two years, if he could help it.”
“Not since the night when you sprang to your feet in his house and cried out ‘She has this moment died.’”
Corinne started up and fell back again with a low cry.
“No, no, I didn’t mean to move. I was taken by surprise. I didn’t think you knew.”
“Oh, I knew,” he replied, nodding at her savagely.
So he held her really at his mercy. Even if she escaped him for this night, she was his prisoner. Suspicion had been strong against her. Almost she had been arrested after Elizabeth Clutter’s death. If that mad hysterical outcry had been known to the police, she surely would have been — and women went to the scaffold nowadays.
“Culalla must pay for his supper,” Archie Clutter continued. “He won’t want that story published.”
But Corinne knew very well that there was no possibility in that direction. There was no man who would be less likely to endure even a threat of blackmail than Culalla. He was clever, too, and quick. He would get to work upon the instant. Archie Clutter had a weak joint in his armour as well as she.
“Threaten him, through me, through anyone,” she replied, “he would pursue you...he would drive you under...you don’t know him.”
Again Clutter’s eyes dropped from her face; and in a low voice he poured out such a string of blasphemous and beastly phrases as made her blood run cold. They were all minted in the convict station of Cayenne, grossly picturesque and abominable and many of them in the slang of the prison so that their meaning was lost upon Corinne. And as the stream flowed, his voice cracked, and his body shook. No horror was to be spared Corinne that night. For she saw that his mind was rocking on its base. The ten years of horror and misery, trebly horrible to the man reared in luxury, and now this crushing disappointment at the end, was it strange if he went mad now, here, in this room where she lay beneath his hands? Once or twice he looked at her with a horrible furtiveness, his lips drawn back, his teeth gleaming, and then dropped his head again and resumed his dreadful monologue, his voice wavering and cracking; and all the time the long fingers worked as though now they caressed and now they crumbled something into fragments. Corinne, watching, suddenly found her wits going, her hold upon her nerves breaking down. She was on the very edge of hysteria.
“Stop!” she whispered piteously. “Stop Or I must scream! I can’t help it! I can’t.”
Already her voice was rising gustily, the scream was gathering at the back of her throat. In a moment it would be beyond control. With her own hands she plucked at the sheet, covered her lips with it and crushed it into her mouth. In imagination she felt those working fingers once more tightening about her face, choking her, drowning her.
There was just a glimmer of fear in Clutter’s eyes too.
“Lie still!” he commanded.
It would be the end of him too if Corinne were to scream and Corinne were to die. The money was gone and with it everything. The time for anger and revenge would come later. Now Corinne must be used.
“You have a great friend in a woman.”
“Ariadne!” Corinne looked at her enemy warily. Was Ariadne to be dragged into this whirlpool too? Not if she could help it! Rather anything — even those encircling hands! Her debt to Ariadne’s generous championship could not be measured. Corinne was all that Trevor thought her — rapacious, unscrupulous, criminal. But she was on her knees to Ariadne Ferne.
“She has nothing at all,” she replied.
“But she has a lover who has much,” said Clutter.
“He is not her lover.”
Clutter shrugged his shoulders. He was not there to quarrel over terms.
“He would give a great deal if she were in peril.”
His whole fortune, as Corinne very well knew, but she was careful not to say one word. She watched Clutter and waited. All her wits were alert now. She must not miss a word.
“You have got some money in the house?” he asked.
Corinne had thirty pounds and some few pieces of jewellery.
“That will do.”
He reflected again for a few moments.
“She has a car!”
“Yes.”
“And drives it?”
“Yes.”
Clutter outlined now his plan. He would need some days to find out the place he wanted. It should not take long. He remembered enough of England, though he had seen little enough of it during this last ten years. There was a great stretch of common land between Esher and Cobham where the road ran between heather. Turn off along a by-road you ran amongst pine-woods, through spaces of empty country. It would be necessary to find some hut, some cottage which was unoccupied, a woodman’s but would do. Corinne must see to it that on a chosen afternoon her friend Ariadne should drive her alone into this wilderness. The rest he and his friend would see to.
Corinne listened. It was just the sort of scheme which a man, separated from the world in a convict station, brooding over his sins, seething with hatred, would invent — at once violent, and brutal and childish. Corinne’s first thought, “It’s impossible! It’s crazy!” Her second, “Yet even crazy things are done, if there’s audacity to do them.” She threw out objections as though she were already a partner in his scheme.
“The next day there would be a hue and cry...Someone would have seen us on the road...There would be a search.”
“No, there would be no search.”
That same night a warning would be posted into Strickland’s letter-box that if he wished to see Ariadne again, he must breathe no word to the police. He must leave his money at a newspaper shop in Soho, say, where letters were received. He must keep no watch upon that shop. It would be known if he did.
“How?” asked Corinne.
“All that day my little friend would sit behind a dingy curtain at a window opposite. Only in the evening when he was sure no watch was being kept, he would send a boy to fetch the package.”
Archie Clutter knew the tricks of crime, he had lived amongst convicted criminals so long that he must know them. The money would be brought out of London at once. Ariadne and Corinne could be safe at home that night. It was all crazy — yes — and yet such things had happened, did happen. Ariadne would drive her alone into the pine-wood. She had but to plead a headache. There were lonely glades amongst the pine-woods where you might lie hidden for a month. Strickland would pour out his money with both hands for Ariadne at a mere hint of torture. Yes, so far the scheme was mad, yet it was feasible.
“But afterwards,” Corinne objected. She had not the whole of his intention yet she imagined. “Afterwards when we were released — what then? You don’t think Colonel Strickland would sit quiet and twiddle his thumbs?”
She saw the ghost of a smile flicker about Clutter’s lips, and vanish. He looked away from her. It seemed that he had suddenly grown shy. Oh, there was more logic in his plan than she had as yet discovered. Now she was sure of it.
“No, but we should have gone.”
“He would know where you had hidden. You could be traced.”
“We should have crossed the sea.”
“Passports?” Corinne suggested.
Archie Clutter grinned.
“Only the innocent are troubled about passports.”
“He would follow you to the ends of the earth.”
“We should accept that risk.”
And at last Corinne knew the black purpose in his mind. The flickering smile had betrayed him. It had returned to his face, against his will. So he had let it broaden into a grin at the comical idea that men who knew their way about had trouble in securing passports which would let them through the wide meshes of the embarkation ports. But he had not deceived Corinne. His eyes were veiled, his face averted, but he had not kept his secret. Corinne saw a little glade hidden from the sunlight by dark crowded pines and two low mounds of turf side by side. Ariadne and she would be free the moment the money was received. They could both be at their houses that night. Could they? They were to go the same road as Maung H’la. They might lie in their graves undiscovered for a century, or until the builder’s pickaxe rang upon their bones.
“Well?” he asked, and swiftly he seized her two wrists and joined them together in his left hand. He stooped forward over her, and his right hand crept forward over the sheet; “Which is it to be, Corinne? Do you help me?”
She stared at him with wide-open eyes.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He stooped a little lower.
“Take care, Corinne!” he warned her. “A word to the police and you answer for Elizabeth’s death. A word to anyone else, and you deal with me, Corinne.”
“I — I won’t breathe a word,” she gasped. “Let me go! Let me go!”
But he shook her hands and laughed quietly to himself. He was amused and his amusement daunted her more than his threats.
“Listen, Corinne. I was a very important person at Cayenne, a person greatly respected, greatly feared. I’ll tell you. It’ll help you to keep faith with me. Up!”
He dragged her up until his mouth was close to her ear.
“Listen, little Corinne,” and his voice cracked as he whispered to her the same amusing secret which Hospel Roussencq had whispered to Mr. Ricardo on the Duke Street Garden. Each had made a mystery of the foul thing he had to tell, and each in turn had his advantage by so telling it.
Corinne fell back with a moan.
“You? You?” she whispered, her face white as the pillow against which it lay, her lips trembling and a look of horror and repulsion upon her face as though a hooded cobra had reared itself hissing in her path. “Oh!” and her voice died in a wail.
“Yes, I,” said Clutter, chuckling. “In two more nights I come — just at this hour. I have my key, Corinne, to my house — I must find no brand-new chain upon the door, Corinne. I’ll give you your route. It is understood?”
“Yes.”
“Where is your money?”
She told him that it was in a drawer of her dressing-table, between the windows. Her jewels rested in a black leather case in front of the mirror. Archie Clutter rose and looped up the bell out of Corinne’s reach.
“Lie still!” he ordered.
“I’ll not move,” she answered.
Clutter emptied the money out of the drawer into his pocket. In the jewel case a couple of pearl eardrops, a small sunburst of diamonds, a ring set with a large emerald, a string of small pearls were all that she had left. They followed the money into Clutter’s pocket. He returned to the bedside, moving with extraordinary noiselessness and speed, and taking up his hat from a little table close to the door.
“I go now. In two nights from now! Remember! Or I shall have to say to you—” He was at the door when a jest of an exquisite humour came to him. He returned solemnly to the bedside and stood there, towering and immense. He said in a hollow voice, “Corinne, the moment has come to be brave.”
These time-honoured words which the French executioner utters when he enters the condemned cell and the guillotine is set up in the square tickled Archie Clutter’s sense of fun all the more because of the secret which he had whispered in her ear. He had been the Deibler, the Monsieur de Paris of the convict station, and from time to time he had had much work upon his hands. As he spoke, he turned out suddenly the light by the bedside with a sudden snap. That, too, appealed to his curious sense of humour, but it was a dangerous trick. For it brought Corinne’s heart fluttering into her throat and a cry broke from her like the rattle of the dying.
She neither heard the door close nor a step upon the stair. She could not believe that she was alone — alone and alive. She lay trembling in her bed. Not a sound came to her ears. She dared not move. Then in a panic she
sprang up. She felt for the cord of the bell and could not find it. Little whimpering cries broke from her mouth as her hands fumbled against the wall. Something struck against her face, and she screamed now. It was the handle of the bell which had struck her. She seized it and rang and rang and rang again even after she heard the hurried footsteps of her maid running down the stairs.
XXII. THE FLIGHT
A FEW MINUTES afterwards Strickland knocked upon the door. The story told to him was told on the spur of the moment. Corinne was shattered by the terror of the ordeal through which she had just passed, her brain was whirling. She had one clear conviction, and that rather felt than formulated; that there would be no wisdom in any confidence she might make to-night. She might talk wildly and let slip words which must never be spoken. She must have time to bring order and quiet into her distracted mind. So, to give herself that time, she snatched at the first lie which came to hand.
“It was Leon whom you saw,” she said. “He has returned.”
In the morning, after some hours of fever and restlessness, two resolves were already formed. She drew the telephone receiver close to her and made an appointment with Ariadne.
“I have to rehearse a new dance at ten. I will come round to your house soon after eleven. Will you please wait for me?”
She then took her bath, and whilst she dressed she had a suit-case packed by her maid. For the second of her clear resolutions was that never again would she sleep in that house. Even if she dozed for a second, worn out with fatigue, it would be only to wake up with a scream and see, in fancy or in fact, that great creature of the jungle watching her with lambent eyes from the edge of the bed.
“I shall be away for a night or two,” she explained to her maid. “I’ll telephone to you in the course of the day.”
“Very well, madam,” said the maid. “You have some engagements.”
“Let me hear them.”
Whilst she pressed her little hat down over her shingled head, the maid read the engagements out — a luncheon at the Semiramis, an appointment with her manicurist, the treasure hunt at night.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 79