They rode back to the camp without a word. But when they reached it, Hardacre said:
“My hut must be searched.”
Colin Saundry waved the suggestion aside.
“It was a trick...No doubt they have some queer powers, these witch-men. Powers we don’t understand. N’Gamba set him to it. By God, she shall pay.” He slipped his arm through Hardacre’s. “You mustn’t mind, Hardacre. We shall be away from here to-morrow.”
Hardacre drew his arm away.
“I insist.”
His pallor under the sunburn gave him the look of a man sick to death. Colin Saundry dropped his arms to his side.
“I wouldn’t have had a ridiculous thing like this happen for ten times eighty-five pounds. You shall have your way, of course.”
And that night as they sat silently smoking about the camp-fire, Saundry’s head man came forward to them carrying a bag of sovereigns which he had just dug out of Hardacre’s hut.
For a while no one uttered a word. A silence weighed about that fire such as might follow a dread verdict in a court of justice. A turtle-dove, startlingly near, called suddenly from a bough of a tree and far away a baboon mumbled, and then by the fire Saundry shook the bag so that the sovereigns in it rattled. If he had been seeking for the one extra jolt which should thrust Carmel into a more definite position between the two men, he could have found nothing more decisive. He had got his money back, yes, but Carmel hated him.
“Of course, it was a plant,” he said. “N’Gamba must have found the thief, and then buried the money, knowing that we should return. I’ll get it cleared up on my next circuit. Meanwhile here’s the money and no harm done. There’s absolutely no motive, of course...”
He spoke with generosity knowing — it must have been so — that there was all the motive in the world. But he was not allowed to expand his argument. Hardacre stood up and pulled at his moustache. Even at that moment he could not be impressive. He alarmed neither of his companions. He did not even look at them. He just said in a dull voice:
“I’ve had about enough of this.”
Then he pulled a pistol out of his pocket, blew out his brains and pitched forward into the fire. Fortunately Carmel Hardacre fainted.
The affair, of course, could not end there. Slowly the facts were put together. Finally N’Gamba spoke. Saundry had sent her a message summoning her to meet him in the forest two days before he returned to his camp by her village. He came to the appointed place riding in great haste and alone. He bade her accuse Hardacre of the theft. No blame should fall on her, for the money would certainly be found in Hardacre’s hut. N’Gamba wept, pleaded, yielded. But she chose her own way. She called in her witch-doctor. She used her own dark gifts. You may give them what name you will, magic, witchcraft, mass hypnotism. It is wiser perhaps to accept the experience of Colin Saundry and say that the fairy story in Kensington happens in Africa. But from first to last N’Gamba never wavered from this assertion. She could have done nothing whatever had Hardacre been innocent.
Colin Saundry, however, got no profit from his scheme. He lost Carmel at the moment when he chinked the bag. He lost his position when N’Gamba told of their meeting in the forest, and thereafter he fell upon difficult days.
Some years afterwards, when rather drunk at a shabby party in his lodgings behind the Bayswater Road, he was asked for his explanation of the story.
He said, “Hardacre, of course, stole the money all right. I saw him going from my hut to his when I came down a hill towards the camp-fire one night. The next morning I missed the money. Oh, yes, Hardacre stole the money all right.” Then he laughed foolishly and bibulously, and added:
“Some t’ings — you meet ‘um so. I t’ink Goddy go do um.”
THE DUCHESS AND LADY TORRENT
A SOUNDING PHRASE which merely states a case will often be accepted as an explanation in other fields besides politics. Thus, if one person said, “Extraordinary affair, that of Lady Torrent: it’s just a case of social suicide,” the reply was certain to be, “Yes, my dear, that’s just what it was.”
Social suicide indeed! Toby Manister, whenever he heard the words — and he heard them pretty often during one season — shrugged his shoulders and smiled contemptuously. They were the mere husk and shell of the affair, and he wanted the kernel.
But he said nothing. For he was a dangerous little busybody with a sharp edge of malice to his mind as well as to his words; and here was, he felt sure, the very puzzle to amuse him, so long as he moved with sufficient discretion. Discretion was necessary, for he had a glimpse of big names, and he at all events had no intention to commit social suicide.
In the end, by putting this and that fragment of conversation together, by analysing little incidents, which he had witnessed without realizing their significance — he was present, for instance, at Lady Torrent’s party — by a deft question here and there, and finally, when he was fairly sure of his facts, by a bold visit to Lady Torrent herself in her retreat near Dieppe, he got the story complete.
And years afterwards, when the principal actors had safely disappeared from the scene, he told it.
It was at a dinner-party where topic chased topic across the table and out of sight like so many feathers of cloud across a sky; a party of young people for the most part, amongst whom Toby Manister was beginning to feel uncomfortably out of date. Then someone dropped a reminiscence of Lady Torrent, and Toby Manister sat up in his chair.
The old phrase leapt out, reminted:
“The most inexplicable affair! After twenty solid years of untiring effort to achieve social success, twenty seasons when the gilt rout-chairs went out of the house every morning to return to the house every evening, when every new reputation was chased and caught and sooner or later exhibited in the drawing-room at Emperor’s Gate, and was there thenceforward to be known as Eddie or Archie or Mona or Dollie, as the case might be — after all the boredom, and patience, and humiliation which such a life must mean, suddenly Lady Torrent goes off at the deep end and commits social suicide. Why?”
Toby Manister replied:
“She saw red suddenly and nothing else mattered. She became a woman instead of a machine like a hostess. She acquired a violent life of her own, or she had always possessed it and now let it rip. She was out for blood, and prudence, ambitions, Society could go to blazes. Poor dear, it was she who went to blazes.”
Toby was so pathetically eager to re-establish himself, that no one of the kind, gay party could gainsay him. They were rewarded with a curiously sinister little story of a duel to the death between a great lady and a little lady in which the little lady very nearly won.
“I sat through the trial, of course,” said Toby Manister, “and I noticed, as all the newspapers noticed, Lady Torrent’s quick, bird-like glances towards the doors at the back of the court whenever they swung open, as they so continually did, to admit one more spectator to the already congested benches. The newspapers put those glances down to fear — fear of what in the end did happen. But I felt certain that not for the first time the papers had observed and misread.
“Fear, after all, is unmistakable; and I couldn’t discover any sign of fear in Lady Torrent; not even, indeed, any anxiety. What I saw was a sly, confident expectation of triumph. The appearance of the little jeweller from Brighton with the necklace in his hand was, I believe, the greatest shock she had ever received in her life. She thought herself safe; she was already gloating, when in an instant—”
Toby Manister lifted his hand and brought the palm of it flat upon the table with a bang as though he crushed an insect.
“We may look forward, it appears, to a charming story,” said the hostess with a note of mockery.
Toby Manister needed no further encouragement.
“The Duchess of Saxemundham was sitting with her secretary,” and he smiled complacently at the little start of astonishment which was universal in his audience. “Yes, the Duchess of Saxemundham was the great lady in the case.”<
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II
The Duchess of Saxemundham was of an unsullied reputation. She possessed enormous wealth, a great political influence, and a reprobate husband who in Paris, and Monte Carlo, and Venice, and Aix, in fact anywhere except in London, might be seen to shake his head muzzily and say, “Cynthia’s miles too good for the likes of me. She’s a classic filly, I am the most contemptible of the Platers.”
Of all these advantages the Duchess was well aware. She carried her charmingly tip-tilted nose high in the air, narrowed her intimate friends into a very small circle, and stood graciously aloof — a figure to which State and Church both clung as a proof that, after all, the world was not wholly lost.
In this particular June when she sat with her secretary in her study overlooking the Green Park, she had reached the age of thirty-one and the very perfection of her delicate, rosebud, rather appealing and pathetic beauty. The Duchess was greatly helped to keep her balance upon her pedestal by a natural look of spirituality which hung like an aura about her small head with its heavy coils of dark hair. This look and her little wistful smile were indeed among her most important assets; for apart from their effect upon the people who didn’t know her, they made her very human and racy comments upon people and things seem attractively bizarre to those who did.
“There’s another letter from Lady Torrent,” said Muriel Chalmers, the secretary, as she tore open the envelope with the laugh which in so many houses greeted Lady Torrent’s invitations. “She expects you to dine with her on Thursday week.”
“Expects me?” exclaimed the Duchess — she was altogether Duchess at that moment. “Why, I have refused to go.”
“I know. I wrote the letter,” said Muriel.
She spoke slowly with a note of perplexity in her voice as she read this second invitation from Lady Torrent.
“I asked you to mention that I hadn’t so far the honour of her acquaintance.”
“And I did mention it. But — it’s quite impossible, of course — but this letter reads to me like a threat.”
She turned to Cynthia Saxemundham with the letter in her hand.
Cynthia took it with a trill of amusement. Yes, there it was, a threatening letter — oh, very cleverly worded, not a phrase but could be made to look innocence itself — yet, taken altogether, a pistol held quite definitely to the Duchess of Saxemundham’s head.
Muriel Chalmers awaited another delicate outburst of amusement, but it never came. She turned about again with a gleam of anxiety in her eyes. But it was nothing to the anxiety which was now visible in every feature of Cynthia Saxemundham’s face. She sat very still and spoke rather to herself than to her young secretary.
“She would never have dared to write like this unless—” The Duchess did not finish the sentence but rose abruptly and ran out of the room. The windows were all open and Muriel heard her humming a gay little tune as she moved about her bedroom just above. Muriel drew a breath of relief.
But though the Duchess returned to the study still humming, she was doing it absently and her face had quite lost its colour.
“Muriel,” she said abruptly, “you remember that maid of mine, Nellie Webster, whom I dismissed for drinking?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what became of her?”
Muriel Chalmers shook her head.
“No. She never wrote for a character.”
“She didn’t need one,” the Duchess returned dryly. “She went straight off to Lady Torrent. I have asked my housekeeper. She took with her something much more valuable than a character.”
She sat down and smoked a cigarette and faced the position of affairs.
“Lady Torrent wishes to push that very ponderous husband of hers into the Cabinet, of which she hasn’t a chance. Partly for that reason, partly because I have always refused to know the woman, she wishes to exhibit me in her house.”
A sudden vision of Lady Torrent’s good-looking little face, hard as iron under its pretence of bonhomie and vivacity, made the Duchess shiver. “She’s a poisonous little devil too,” she concluded lamely.
Muriel Chalmers, no less her friend than her secretary, turned to her aghast.
“Oh, Duchess, you are not going to go!” she exclaimed.
Cynthia Saxemundham smiled.
“No, my dear, I won’t. I can see the butler announcing me, the guests smirking, Lady Torrent hurrying forward, her smile of welcome struggling with a little snarl of triumph, and the captive Duchess trying to conceal her handcuffs and to be spoken of from that evening on as ‘Cynthia Saxemundham.’ No! No! — whatever happens!”
“But must anything happen?” Muriel Chalmers asked timidly. “Can’t I do something?”
Cynthia Saxemundham’s face lost its look of defiance, and softened.
“Yes, my dear, you can ring up the Guards’ Club and ask if Colonel Marchmont is there. If so, I should like to speak to him.”
In a few moments Muriel handed the instrument to the Duchess.
“He is on the line.”
The Duchess spoke three sentences:
“Henry, will you please come to luncheon with me to-day at half-past one? I shall be alone. I want your help.”
It was like her to hang up the receiver without waiting for an answer.
“He will help me out of my scrape,” she said, and she added, with a grimace which altogether failed to hide a very genuine regret, “but at the same time I shall lose for good something which I have treasured for a long while. On the whole — yes — damn Lady Torrent!”
III
Lieut.-Col. Henry Marchmont, with a long tail of decorations to his name, had just returned from an expedition in the deserts of Asia, and should consequently have furnished the Duchess with an hour’s amusement and interest. But nothing in the world at the moment could have done that. Cynthia Saxemundham ate a deplorable luncheon.
For she had to confess that she, the one woman on a pedestal, had once taken a lover. And she had to make the confession to a man whom she had very nearly married, who on her account had remained a bachelor and become a wanderer over the face of the earth, and who, besides, worshipped her as a snow-white martyr bearing up courageously in a very speckled world.
The task was not very pleasant for the Duchess of Saxemundham, but she managed to stumble through it over the coffee. She saw her friend’s face harden and a flush of anger deepen the tan of his cheeks.
“Who’s the man?” he asked bluntly as soon as she had finished.
“Yes, of course, he would ask that,” thought the Duchess, wringing her hands beneath the table. There was no escape for her, however. She mentioned a name beneath her breath. The Colonel grew redder than ever.
“That fellow!” he exploded. “Ronald Chepstowe! Cynthia! He’s hairy-heeled.”
“Oh, Henry, I never looked at his heels,” cried Cynthia in despair. “He was artistic, and sympathetic — and he played polo divinely — and it only lasted the tiniest bit of time — and I was most unhappy — it was just a year after I was married and things were most hateful — and” — she stole a glance at Henry Marchmont— “and you were miles away on the other side of the world — and, anyway, you put me up on a pedestal and wouldn’t have — and so it didn’t seem to matter whom so long as—”
“So long as it was someone,” interrupted Marchmont.
“Henry, you are hating me,” she cried.
“I am disappointed,” replied the Colonel gruffly, and he rose and looked for a long time out of the window.
The Duchess looked pathetically at his broad shoulders; they were rather attractive, without an ounce of spare flesh, she was suddenly diverted to recognize, but her own woes seized upon her again the next moment. She saw herself a white alabaster statue lying on the grass beside a pedestal, all in pieces. Would he put the pieces together again, or would he look out of the window for ever and ever?
He turned back at last.
“You wanted some help, Cynthia,” he said in a gentler voice.
“Yes. Your return to London was announced in The Times yesterday. So you are certain to be asked to a party by Lady Torrent.”
“That has already happened,” said Marchmont.
“Oh, you haven’t refused?” cried Cynthia, a new anxiety seizing her.
“Of course not,” said Marchmont. “I have accepted. I am dining with her to-morrow.”
Cynthia Saxemundham was relieved, of course; yes, undoubtedly she was relieved. But the answer caused her a little shock, nevertheless. It had almost the air of a desertion.
“Why?” she asked, in a rather chilly voice.
“Because I amuse myself there,” he answered. “People do. It’s an amusing house. I never could understand why you must go shouting all over London that you wouldn’t go inside her door.”
“She calls people whom she doesn’t know by their Christian names,” said the Duchess stubbornly.
“Well, you needn’t keep slapping her face all the time just for that.”
“Oh, Henry, I don’t slap her face,” cried Cynthia, and suddenly her fingers tingled. “But I should like to,” she added with a heartfelt fervour.
Colonel Marchmont looked at her curiously.
“What in the world has Lady Torrent done to you?” he asked.
Cynthia Saxemundham told him of the invitation which was a threat.
“She has got a hold over you, then?”
“Yes, Henry.”
“What sort of a hold?”
Cynthia Saxemundham trod very delicately, like a person on the edge of a quicksand.
“Do you remember that old lawyer, Sir Hugo Cope, who was such a good friend of mine when I was a child?”
Marchmont nodded.
“A wicked old devil,” said he.
“But such a darling,” replied Cynthia. “The day I was married, at the reception after the ceremony, he said to me, ‘My dear, I have given you a handsome present, but I am now going to give you three pieces of advice which are much more valuable. First, if you have to go and stay at an hotel, take care you always stay under your own name. Second, never keep any letters. Third, if in spite of one and two you still get into trouble, come and see me at once!’”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 829