We do not move unfortunately all in one piece. It would be much simpler
if we did, and if our actions could be accounted for by saying, "He did
this, being a generous man, or a forgiving man, or a curious man, or a
remorseful man." Unhappily, and it makes our actions more difficult to
account for, we are more complicated than this, and Pateley, when he
finally felt impelled to make his way into Rachel's presence so soon
after parting from her in the promenade, could not probably have said
exactly what motive prompted him to seek her. To Rachel he arrived as
the complement, the consolidation, of the resolve that she had made. She
hardly tried to conceal her agitation as she shook hands with him and
looked in his face. Her own wore an expression that had not been there
an hour ago. Something new had come to life in it. So conscious were
they both of something abnormal, overmastering, between them that there
did not seem anything strange in the fact that for a moment, after the
first greeting, they stood without thinking of any of the commonplaces
of intercourse. Then Pateley, more accustomed to overlay the realities
of life by the conventional outside, recovered himself and said in an
ordinary tone, looking round him--
"What a delightful oasis! What charming quarters you are in here!"
"Yes, we like them very much," said Rachel, recovering herself; and they
went towards the little table and sat down.
"No tea for me, thank you," said Pateley. "I have just been made to
drink a liquid distantly resembling it at the bazaar."
"At the bazaar?" said Rachel. "It was German tea, I suppose?"
"I imagine so. It has been well said," said Pateley, "that no nation has
yet been known great enough to produce two equally good forms of
national beverage. We have good tea, but our coffee is abominable: the
Germans have good coffee, but their tea is poison. The Spaniards, I
believe, have good chocolate, but that I have to take on hearsay. I have
never been to Spain. I mean to go some day, though."
"Do you?" Rachel said, dimly hearing his flow of words while she made up
her mind what her own were to be. She had had so little time to form her
plan of action, to piece together all that she had been hearing during
the afternoon, that it was not yet clear to her that from the
circumstances of the case Pateley must necessarily be concerned in it;
and at the moment she began to speak she simply looked upon him as some
one who knew Rendel in London, who had known her father and mother, who
had a general air of bluff and hearty serviceability, and had presented
himself at a moment when she had no one else to turn to.
"Mr. Pateley," she said, and at the sudden ring of resolution in her
tone Pateley's face changed and his smiling flow of chatter about
nothing came to a pause. "There is something I want very much to ask you
about," she went on, "something I want your help in."
"I am at your orders," said Pateley, with a smile and bow that concealed
his surprise.
"It is something that matters very, very much," Rachel went on.
"Something you could find out for me."
Pateley said nothing.
"I don't know if you know," she went on hurriedly--"if you heard, of
what happened to me in London just before my father died? I had an
accident. It seemed a slight one at the time. I fell down on the stairs
one evening that he was worse when I ran down quickly to fetch my
husband, and I had concussion of the brain afterwards and was
unconscious for forty-eight hours. And since, I have not been able to
remember anything of what happened during those days."
Pateley made a sort of sympathetic sound and gesture.
"But," Rachel said, "I have heard to-day--not until to-day--of something
that happened during that time, something terrible. I am going to tell
it to you, in the greatest confidence. You will see when I tell you
that it matters very, very much. First of all,--this I remember--on the
day my father began to be worse, Lord Stamfordham brought my husband
some papers to copy for him in which was the Agreement with Germany, and
told him no one was to know about them, and my husband told no one, and
sent them back, when they were done, to Stamfordham, in a sealed
packet."
Pateley, as he listened, sat absolutely impenetrable, with his eyes
fixed on the ground.
"But somebody got hold of them," she went on--"somebody must have stolen
them, because they were published the next morning in the paper, in the
_Arbiter_." And as the words left her lips she suddenly realised that
the man in front of her was the one of all others in the world who must
know what had happened. The _Arbiter_ was embodied in Pateley, it was
Pateley: that, everybody knew, everybody repeated. Pateley would, he
must, be able to tell her.
"Oh," she cried, "the _Arbiter_ is your paper!"
"Yes," said Pateley, looking at her.
"Then," she said, "you know--you must know."
"Know what?" he said calmly.
"You must know," she said, "who it was told the _Arbiter_ what was in
those papers."
Pateley sat silent a moment. Then he said--
"It can and does happen occasionally that things are brought to the
_Arbiter_ of which I don't know the origin, in fact of which the origin
is purposely kept a secret."
She waited for him to add something to this sentence, to add a _but_ to
it, but he remained silent. Being unversed in diplomatic evasions, she
accepted his words as a disclaimer.
"But still," she said, "even if you don't know this you could find it
out. It matters terribly. I don't want to say to any one else, it is not
a thing to be told, how horribly it matters, but I must tell _you_, that
you may see. Lord Stamfordham thought that my husband had betrayed the
secret--he told him so then. And to-day--it was too terrible!--he was at
a luncheon to which Frank and Mr. Wentworth went, not knowing----" A
sudden involuntary change in Pateley's face made her stop and say, "But
perhaps you were there? Were you at the luncheon?"
"No," said Pateley. "I was not there."
"But you heard about it?" she said.
"Yes," he said after a pause. "I heard about it."
"It's too horrible!" said Rachel, covering her face with her hands. "Of
course you heard about it--everybody will hear about it: how Lord
Stamfordham insulted him and refused to sit down with him, because of
the unjust accusation that was brought against him. Now do you see," she
said excitedly, and Pateley, as he looked at her, was amazed at the fire
that shone from her eyes, at the glow of excitement in her whole
being--"now do you see how much it matters? how if we don't find out the
truth, if we don't get to know who did it, this is the kind of thing
that will happen to him? You see now, don't you? You will help me?"
Pateley had got up and restlessly paced to the end of the garden and
back, his eyes fixed on the ground, Rachel breathlessly watching him. He
was moved at her distress, he felt the stirrings of something like
remorse at the fate that had overtaken Rendel. But in Pateley's
Juggernaut-like progress through the world he did not, as a rule, stop
to see who were the victims that were left gasping by the roadside. As
long as the author of the mischief drives on rapidly enough, the evil he
has left behind him is not brought home to him so acutely as if he is
compelled to stop and bend over the sufferer. But a brief moment of
reflection made him pretty clear that neither himself nor the _Arbiter_
had anything to fear from the disclosure. He had nothing particularly
heroic in his composition; he would not have felt called upon for the
sake of Francis Rendel, or even for the sake of Rendel's wife, to
sacrifice his own destiny and possibilities if it had been a question of
choosing between his own and theirs; but fortunately this choice would
not be thrust upon him. He looked up and met Rachel's eyes fixed upon
him.
"Yes," he said. "I will help you."
"Oh, thank you!" she cried, her heart swelling with relief. "Will you,
can you find out about it?"
"Yes," said Pateley again. He paused a moment, then came back and stood
in front of her. "I have no need to find out," he said slowly. "I know
who did it."
Rachel sprang up.
"What?" she cried, quivering with anxiety. "Do you mean that you know
now, that you can tell Frank, that you can tell Lord Stamfordham? Oh,
why didn't you say so?"
Pateley paused.
"I didn't know," he said, "that Stamfordham had accused your husband of
it, and so I kept--I was rather bound to keep--the other man's secret."
"The other man?" Rachel repeated, looking at him.
"Yes," said Pateley. "The man who did it."
Rachel started. Of course, yes--if her husband had not done it some one
else had, they were shifting the horrible burden on to another. But that
other deserved it, since he was the guilty man.
"Yes," she said lower, "of course I know there is some one else!--it is
very terrible--but--but--it's right, isn't it, that the man who has done
it should be accused and not one who is innocent?"
"Yes," said Pateley, "it is right."
"You must tell me," she said, "you must!--you must tell me everything
now, as I have told you. Is it some one to whom it will matter very
much?"
Pateley waited.
"No," he said at length, "it won't matter to him."
Rachel looked at him, not understanding.
He went on, "Nothing will ever matter to him again. He is dead."
"Dead, is he?" said Rachel, but even in the horror-struck tone there
rang an accent of glad relief. "Then it can't matter to him. And it is
right, after all, that people should know what he did. It is right, it
is justice, isn't it?" she repeated, as though trying to reassure
herself, "not only because of Frank?"
"Yes," said Pateley, "I believe that it is right, that it is justice."
Then as he looked at her he suddenly became conscious of an unwonted
difficulty of speech, of an almost unknown wave of emotion rising within
him, of shrinking from the words he was now clear had to be said.
"Mrs. Rendel," he said at last, "I am afraid it will be very painful to
you to hear what I am going to say."
She looked at him bewildered. He waited one moment, almost hoping that
the truth might dawn upon her before he spoke, but she was a thousand
miles from being anywhere near it. "Those papers which I published in
the _Arbiter_ the next morning were shown to me on the afternoon your
husband had them to copy, by--" again the strange unfamiliar
perturbation stopped him, and he felt he had to make a distinct effort
to bring the name out--"your father, Sir William Gore."
Rachel said absolutely nothing. She looked at him with dilated eyes,
incredulous amazement and then horror in her face, as she saw in his
that he was telling her the truth.
"My father?" she said at last, with trembling lips.
"Yes," Pateley said. The worst was over now, he felt, and he had
recovered possession of himself.
"No, no, it can't be!" she said miserably. "It's not possible...."
"I fear it is," said Pateley. "They were shown to myself, you see, so it
is an absolute certainty."
"But when was it?" said Rachel, bewildered. "When did he have them?"
"They were left," Pateley said, "in the study where he was, when your
husband went down to speak to Lord Stamfordham. During that time I
happened to go in."
And as Rachel listened to his brief account of what had taken place she
knew that there was no longer any doubt as to the culprit. For the
moment, as the idol of her life fell before her in ruins the discovery
she had made swallowed up everything else. Pateley made a move.
"Wait, wait!" she said. "Don't go away. Only wait till I see what I must
do. It is all so horrible! I see nothing clearly yet."
He walked away to the other end of the little garden.
She leant back in her chair, her eyes fixed, seeing nothing, trying to
make up her mind. Gradually what she must do became more and more
distinct to her, more and more inevitable. The sheer force of her
agitation and emotion were carrying her own. If she acted at once,
within the next half-hour, anything, everything might be possible. She
would not wait to think, she would do it now, while it was still
possible to pronounce the name, the dear name that she had hardly been
able to bring to her lips during these last weeks in which every day,
every hour, she had been conscious of her loss. She would go to the
person who must be told, and who alone could remedy the great evil that
had been done. She got up, a despairing determination in her face.
Pateley looked at her, his face asking the question which he did not put
in words.
"I am going to Lord Stamfordham," she said. "I am going to tell him."
"You?" said Pateley. "Are you going to tell him yourself?"
"Yes," she said, "it is I who must tell him. I have quite made up my
mind." She turned to him appealingly as though taking for granted he
would help her. "I want to go now, while I feel I can, and before Frank
knows anything about it. Can you help me--would you help me to find Lord
Stamfordham?"
"Certainly," said Pateley, with a new admiration for Rachel rising
within him, but with some misgivings, however, as to the possibility or
the desirability of running Stamfordham to earth among his present
surroundings.
"Do you know where he is?" Rachel said.
"I should think probably at the bazaar," said Pateley, and as he
reflected on the scene he had just left, Stamfordham surrounded by a
bevy of attractive ladies beseeching him to give them an autograph, to
buy a buttonhole, to drink their tea, to put into their raffles, and to
have his fortune told, he felt still more dubious as to the mission he
was engaged upon. Fortunately Rachel realised none of these things.
"Come, then, let us go," she said, with a vibrating anxiety and
excitement, at strange variance with the usual atmosphere that
surrounded her, and he followed her out of the garden in the direction
of the Casino.