“Yes, yes,” interrupted Charnock, hurriedly, as though he had no heart to hear more; “I understand.”
“You can understand then that when the crash came we were glad. Two years after the marriage old Allan Bedlow sickened. Miranda came home to nurse him and Ralph — he bought a schooner-yacht. Allan Bedlow died; Miranda inherited, and the estate was settled upon her. Ralph could not touch a farthing of the capital, and he was aggrieved. Miranda returned to Gibraltar, and matters went from worse to worse. The crash came a year later. The nature of it is neither here nor there, but Ralph had to go, and had to go pretty sharp. His schooner-yacht was luckily lying in Gibraltar Bay; he slipped on board before gunfire, and put to sea as soon as it was dark; and he was not an instant too soon. From that moment he disappeared, and the next news we had of him was the discovery of his body upon Rosevear two years afterwards.”
Charnock hunted through the jungle of Lady Donnisthorpe’s words for a clue to the distress which Miranda had betrayed that evening, but he did not discover one. Another question forced itself into his mind. “Why does Mrs. Warriner live at Ronda?” he asked. “I have never been there, but there are no English residents, I should think.”
“That was one of her reasons,” replied Lady Donnisthorpe. “At least I think so, but upon that too she is silent, and when she will not speak no one can make her. You see what Ralph did was hushed up, — it was one of those cases which are hushed up, — particularly since he had disappeared and was out of reach. But everyone knew that disgrace attached to it. His name was removed from the Army List. Miranda perhaps shrank from the disgrace. She shrank too, I think, from the cheap pity of which she would have had so much. At all events she did not return home, she sent for Jane Holt, her former companion, and settled at Ronda.” Lady Donnisthorpe looked doubtfully at Charnock. “Perhaps there were other reasons too, sacred reasons.” But she had not made up her mind whether it would be wise to explain those other reasons before her guests began to take their leave of her; and so the opportunity was lost.
Charnock walked back to his hotel that night in a frame of mind entirely strange to him. He was inclined to rhapsodise; he invented and rejected various definitions of woman; he laughed at the worldly ignorance of the dowager. “A woman, madam “ — he imagined himself to be lecturing her— “is the great gift to man to keep him clean and bright like a favourite sword.” He composed other and no less irreproachable phrases, and in the midst of this exhilarating exercise was struck suddenly aghast at the temerity of his own conduct that night, at the remembrance of his persistency. However, he was not in a mood to be disheartened. The dawn took the sky by surprise while he was still upon his way. The birds bustled among the leaves in the gardens, and a thrush tried his throat, and finding it clear gave full voice to his song. The blackbirds called one to the other, and a rosy light struck down the streets. It was morning, and he stopped to wonder whether Miranda was yet asleep. He hoped so, intensely, for the sake of her invaluable health.
But Miranda was seated by her open window, listening to the birds calling in the Park, and drawing some quiet from the quiet of the lawns and trees; and every now and then she glanced across her shoulder to where a torn white glove lay upon the table, as though she was afraid it would vanish by some enchantment.
But the next day Miranda packed her boxes, and when Charnock called upon Lady Donnisthorpe, he was informed that she had returned in haste to Ronda. Charnock was surprised, for he remembered that Mrs. Warriner had expressed a doubt whether she would ever return to Ronda, and wondered what had occurred to change her mind. But the surprise and bewilderment were soon swallowed up in a satisfaction which sprang from the assurance that Miranda and he were after all to be neighbours.
CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH MAJOR WILBRAHAM DESCRIBES THE STEPS BY WHICH HE ATTAINED HIS MAJORITY, AND GIVES MIRANDA SOME PARTICULAR INFORMATION
A MONTH LATER at Ronda, and a little after midday. In the cool darkness of the Cathedral, under the great stone dome behind the choir, Miranda was kneeling before a lighted altar. That altar she had erected, as an inscription showed, to the memory of Ralph Warriner, and since her return from England she had passed more than an ordinary proportion of her time in front of it.
This morning, however, an unaccountable uneasiness crept over her. She tried to shake the sensation off by an increased devoutness, but though her knees were bent, there was no prayer in her mind or upon her lips. Her uneasiness increased, and after a while it defined itself. Someone was watching her from behind.
She ceased even from the pretence of prayer. Her heart fluttered up into her throat. She did not look round, she did not move, but she knelt there with a sinking expectation, in the light of the altar candles, and felt intensely helpless because their yellow warmth streamed full upon her face and person, and must disclose her to the watching eyes behind.
She knelt waiting for a familiar voice and a familiar step. She heard only the grating of a chair upon the stone flags beyond the choir, and a priest droning a litany very far away. Here all was quiet — quiet as the eyes watching her out of the gloom.
At last, resenting her cowardice, she rose to her feet and turned. At once a man stepped forward, and her heart gave a great throb of relief, as she saw the man was a stranger.
He bowed, and with an excuse for his intrusion, he handed her a card. She did not look at it, for immediately the stranger continued to speak, in a cool, polite voice, and it seemed to her that all her blood stood still.
“I knew Captain Warriner at Gibraltar,” he said. “In fact I may say that I know him, for he is alive.”
Miranda was dimly aware that he waited for an answer, and then excused her silence with an accent of sarcasm.
“Such good news must overwhelm you, no doubt. I have used all despatch to inform you of it, for I was only certain of the truth yesterday.”
And to her amazement Miranda heard herself reply:
“Then I discovered it a month before you did.”
The next thing of which she was conscious was a thick golden mist before her eyes. The golden mist was the clear sunlight in the square before the Cathedral. Miranda was leaning against the stone parapet, though how she was there she could not have told. She had expected the news. She had even thought that the man standing behind her was her husband, come to tell her it in person; but nevertheless the mere telling of it, the putting of it in words, to quote the stranger’s phrase, had overwhelmed her. Memories of afternoons during which she had walked out with her misery to Europa Point, of evenings when she had sat with her misery upon the flat house-top watching the riding lights in Algeciras Bay, and listening to the jingle of tambourines from the houses on the hillside below — all the sordid unnecessary wretchedness of those three years spent at Gibraltar came crushing her. She savoured again the disgrace which attended upon Ralph’s flight. Her first instinct, when she learned Ralph was alive, had urged her to hide, and at this moment she regretted that she had not obeyed it. She regretted that she had returned to Ronda, where Ralph or any emissary of his at once could find her.
But that was only for a moment. She had returned to Ronda with a full appreciation of the consequences of her return, and for reasons which she was afterwards to explain, and of which, even while she stood in that square, she resumed courage to approve.
The stranger came from the door of the Cathedral and crossed to her.
“Your matter-of-fact acceptance of my news was clever, Mrs. Warriner,” he said with a noticeable sharpness. “Believe me, I do homage to cleverness. I frankly own that I expected a scene of sorts. I was quite taken aback — a compliment, I assure you, upon my puff,” and he bowed with his hand on his breast. “You were out of the Cathedral door before I realised that all this time you had been the Captain’s — would you mind if I said accomplice?”
That her matter-of-fact acceptance of the news was entirely due to the fact that the news dazed her, Miranda did not trouble to explain.
&nb
sp; “The altar,” continued the stranger, in a voice of genuine admiration, “was a master-stroke. To erect an altar to the memory of a husband who is still alive, to pray devoutly before it, is highly ingenious and — may I say? — brave. Religion is a trump-card, Mrs. Warriner, in most of the games where you sit with law and order for your opponents; but not many women have the bravery to play it for its value.”
Miranda coloured at his words. There had been some insincerity in her daily prayers before the altar, though the self-satisfied man who spoke to her had not his finger upon the particular flaw, — enough insincerity to cause Miranda some shame, now that she probed it, and yet in the insincerity there had been also something sincere. The truth is, Miranda could bring herself to wish neither that her husband was dead if he was alive, nor that he should come to life again if he was dead; she made a compromise — she daily prayed with great fervour for his soul’s salvation before the altar she had erected to his memory. But this again was not a point upon which she troubled to enlighten her companion. She was more concerned to discover who the man was, and on what business he had come.
“You knew my husband at Gibraltar,” she said, “and yet—”
“It is true,” replied the man, in answer to her suspicion. “You need not be afraid, Mrs. Warriner. I have not come from Scotland Yard. I have had, I admit, relations with the police, but they have always been of an involuntary kind.”
“You assume,” said she, with some pride, “that I have reason to fear Scotland Yard, whereas nothing was further from my thoughts. Only you say that you knew my husband at Gibraltar. You pretend to come from him—”
“By no means. We are at cross-purposes, I fancy. I do not come from him, though most certainly I did know him at Gibraltar. But I admit that he never invited me to his house.”
“In that case,” said Miranda, with a cold bow, “I can do no more than thank you for the news you give me and wish you a good day.”
She walked by him. He turned and imperturbably fell into step by her side. “Clever,” said he, “clever!” Miranda stopped. “Who are you? What is your business?” she asked.
“As to who I am, you hold my card in your hand.”
Mrs. Warriner had carried it from the Cathedral, unaware that she held it. She now raised it to her eyes and read, Major Ambrose Wilbraham.
Wilbraham noted, though he did not understand, the rapid, perplexed glance which she shot at him. Charnock had spoken to her of a Major Wilbraham, had described him, and undoubtedly this was the man. “As to my business,” he continued, “I give you the news that your husband is alive, but I have also something to sell.”
“What?”
“Obviously my silence. It might be awkward if it was known in certain quarters that Captain Warriner, who sold the mechanism of the new Daventry quick-firing gun to a foreign power; who slipped out of Gibraltar just a night before his arrest was determined on, and who was wrecked a year ago in the Scillies, is not only alive, but in the habit of paying periodical visits to England.”
Mrs. Warriner again read the name upon the card. “Major Ambrose Wilbraham,” she said, with an incredulous emphasis on the Major.
“Captains,” he retorted airily, “have at times deviated from the narrow path, so that a Major may well be forgiven a peccadillo. But I will not deceive you, Mrs. Warriner. The rank was thrust upon me by a barman in Shaftesbury Avenue, and I suffered it, because the title after all gives me the entrance to the chambers of many young men who have, or most often have not, just taken their degrees. So Major I am, but my mess is any bar within a mile of Piccadilly Circus. Shall we say that I hold brevet rank, and am seconded for service in the noble regiment of the soldiers of fortune?”
“And the enemies you fight with,” said Miranda, with a contemptuous droop of the lips, “are women like myself.”
“Pardon me,” retorted Wilbraham, with unabashed good humour. “Women like yourself, Mrs. Warriner, are the vivandières whom we regretfully impress to supply our needs upon the march. Our enemies are the rozzers — again I beg your pardon — the gentlemen in blue who lurk at the street corners, by whom from time to time we are worsted and interned.”
They walked across the square along a narrow street down towards the Tajo, that deep chasm which bisects the town. The heat was intense, the road scorched under foot, and they walked slowly. They made a strange pair in the old, quaint streets, the woman walking with a royal carriage, delicate in her beauty and her dress; the man defiant, battered and worn, with an eye which from sheer habit scouted in front and aside for the chance which might toss his day’s rations in his way.
Their talk was stranger still, for by an unexpressed consent, the subject of the bargain to be struck was deferred, and as they walked Wilbraham illustrated to Miranda the career of a man who lives by his wits, and dwelt even with humour upon its alternations of prosperity and starvation. “I have been a manager of theatrical companies in ‘the smalls,’” he said, “a billiard-marker at Trieste, a racing tipster, a vender of — photographs, and I once carried a sandwich-board down Bond Street, and saw the women I had danced with not so long before draw their delicate skirts from the defilement of my rags. However, I rose to a better position. It is funny, you know, to go right under, and then find there are social degrees in the depths. I have had good times too, mind you. Every now and then I have struck an A1 copper-bottomed gold mine, and then there were dress suits and meals running into one another, and ormolu rooms on the first floor.”
Dark sayings, unintelligible shibboleths, came and went among his words and obscured their meaning; accents and phrases from many countries betrayed the vicissitudes of his life; but he spoke with the accent of a gentleman, and with something of a gentleman’s good humour; so that Miranda, moved partly by his recital and perhaps partly because her own misfortunes had touched her to an universal sympathy, began to be interested in the man who had experienced so much that was strange to her, and they both slipped into a tolerance of each other and a momentary forgetfulness of their relationship as blackmailer and blackmailed.
“I could give you a modern edition of Don Guzman,” he said. “I was a money-lender’s tout at Gibraltar at one time. It’s to that I owed my acquaintance with Warriner. It’s to that I owe my present acquaintance with you.” He came to a dead stop in the full swing of narration. He halted in his steps and banged the point of his stick down into the road. “But I have done with it,” he cried, and drawing a great breath, he showed to Miranda a face suddenly illuminated. “The garrets and the first floors, the stale billiard rooms, the desperate scouting for food like a damned sea-gull — I beg your pardon, Mrs. Warriner. Upon my word, I do! But imagine a poor beggar of a bankrupt painter who, after fifteen years, suddenly finds himself with a meal upon the table and his bills paid! I am that man. Fifteen years of what I have described to you! It might have been less, no doubt, but I hadn’t learnt my lesson. Fifteen years, and from first to last not one thing done of the few things worth doing; fifteen years of a murderous hunt for breakfast and dinner! And I’ve done with it, thanks to you, Mrs. Warriner.” And his face hardened at once and gleamed at her, very cruel and menacing. “Yes, thanks to you! We’ll not forget that.” And as he resumed his walk the astounding creature began gaily to quote poetry:
“I resume
Life after death; for ’tis no less than life
After such long, unlovely labouring days.
A great poet, Mrs. Warriner. What do you think?”
“No doubt,” said Miranda, absently. That one cruel glance had chilled the sympathy in her; Major Wilbraham would not spare either Ralph or herself with the memory of those fifteen years to harden him.
They came to the Ciudad, the old intricate Moorish town of tortuous lanes in the centre of Ronda. Before a pair of heavy walnut doors curiously encrusted with bright copper nails Wilbraham came to a stop. “Your house, I think, Mrs. Warriner,” and he took off his hat and wiped his forehead.
“I should pre
fer,” said she, “to hear what you have to say in the Alameda.”
“As you will. I am bound to say that I could have done with a soda and I’m so frisky, but I recognise that I have no right to trespass upon your hospitality.”
They went on, crossed a small plaza, and so came down to the Tajo. A bridge spans the ravine in a single arch; in the centre of the bridge Miranda stopped, leaned over the parapet and looked downwards. Wilbraham followed her example. For three hundred feet the walls of the gorge fell sheer, at the bottom the turbulence of a torrent foamed and roared, at the top was the span of the bridge. In the brickwork of the arch a tiny window looked out on air.
“Do you see that window?” said Miranda, drily. “The prison is underfoot in the arch of the bridge.”
“Indeed, how picturesque,” returned Wilbraham, easily, who was quite untouched by any menace which Miranda’s words might suggest. Miranda looked across the road towards a guardia. Wilbraham lazily followed the direction of her glance; for all the emotion which he showed blackmail might have been held in Spain an honourable means of livelihood. Miranda turned back. “That window,” she said, “is the window of the prison.”
“The view,” remarked Wilbraham, “would compensate in some measure for the restriction.”
“Chains might add to the restriction.”
“Chains are unpleasant,” Wilbraham heartily agreed.
Miranda realised that she had tempted defeat in this little encounter. She accepted it and walked on.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 299