Reason Tottering on Its Throne
After three nervously anxious days Nina Darling journeyed back to London
and reopened her flat at Mayfair--a very different Nina indeed from the
frolicsome Nina who went to Puddlewood to display her restored beauty.
The duke's story concerning Kneedrock had distressed her woefully. As a
girl, in spite of her high-spirited independence and honey-bee
proclivity of sipping sweets where she found them, she had loved him
deeply, and since his return from self-banishment--since the one great
tragedy of her life at Umballa--she had found in him her sole rock of
dependence. Stubborn--cruel often at times as he was--she nevertheless
felt and knew that while he reprobated and deplored her seeming
lightness of character, yet deep in his soul he still held her very
dear.
From what she had learned--but which she still hoped to prove grossly
exaggerated--she was now more than ever convinced that this was true.
How profoundly he had been stirred and hurt by her wilful follies this
awful climax--oh, it couldn't, it must not be true--demonstrated as
nothing else, either word or action, could possibly have done.
Selfishly, for her own passing pleasure, she had driven men to
intemperance, to exile, to self-destruction even; and now, as a fitting
culmination in _lex talionis_--the one strong man of all, the king, the
god she worshiped, had succumbed, they told her, in more awful plight
than any of the others.
In her extremity Nina wired to Bath, bidding Gerald Andrews come to her
at once. Then she sat down and waited.
He came by the first train, yet the intervening time seemed endless. And
he found her pale and haggard, with purple crescents beneath dull, tired
eyes; for in twenty-four hours she had neither eaten nor slept. It was
nine o'clock at night, and the rain, driven by an east wind, was beating
against the windows like an avalanche.
"Gerald," she greeted, giving him the tips of cold fingers, "you are so
good. I need you terribly."
"You are ill," he said at once. "What have you been doing?"
She told him briefly what she had heard.
"It is the uncertainty," she added. "It's killing me. If I could only be
sure--one way or the other--I--" Her voice quavered.
"Have you dined?" he interrupted.
"No; I'm not hungry. I haven't thought of eating."
"But you must," he urged. "You must keep up your strength. Unless you do
I shall refuse to help you."
"I've no appetite," she said. "I hunger only for facts--for the truth."
"Then you must prepare for it. It may be too strong for an empty
stomach."
But this only alarmed her. "You know?" she cried hysterically. "You know
something already?"
"Nothing," he answered--"nothing at all. Only--well, the fact is, I
haven't dined, either. I came straight here from the station. Could
you--"
"You poor boy!" she broke in. "Of course. Please touch the bell. There;
behind you."
"Won't you come out with me?"
"No; I couldn't; besides, listen to the rain, and--and I'm not dressed,
you see."
"You don't want me to go alone?"
"Oh, no, no, no," she protested. "I have so much to say--"
"Very well. I'll stop, and I'll eat; but on one condition. You must eat,
too."
"I can't," she insisted. "I can't, really. I'd choke."
"Try it," he insisted, in turn. "If you choke I'll let you off."
There was consomme, and there were chops--done to a turn--and a
cobwebbed bottle of Pommard. Of the wine Andrews forced her to sip the
better part of a glass, and was rewarded by a faint show of color in her
lips and cheeks.
It stimulated her appetite, too, and she managed to swallow a few
spoonfuls of the soup and a little lean, red meat of a chop. After which
he called her a brave girl and assured her that there was nothing he
wouldn't do for her in return.
"I want you, the very first thing in the morning, to go to Regent's
Park," she said. "I want you to go where the tigers are, and to ask
questions of the guards. They can can tell you whether it is true that a
gentleman has been there recently, acting strangely."
"I'll be there when the gates open," returned Gerald. "What else?"
"If you find it is true--which I hope to Heaven you don't--I want you to
go to Lord Kneedrock's solicitor and learn what he knows about it. You
may tell him you came from me, and that I desire some steps taken."
He looked at her questioningly. He couldn't understand her right to make
such a demand, but he said nothing, except:
"Who is Lord Kneedrock's solicitor?"
"A combined mummy and sphinx," she answered. "His name is Widdicombe,
and he has chambers in the Inner Temple. Your real task will be to get
him to open his mouth. He's a living storehouse of secrets."
"Won't your name open it?"
"The name of his majesty wouldn't open it unless he felt it to be for
his client's interest. I'm afraid you'll find him a very hard nut to
crack, Gerald."
"If I fail, it won't be for lack of effort," he declared determinedly.
Then she smiled at him in the old way for the first time since he came.
"How are the sheep and the ewe lambs?" she asked, with a faint sign of
mischief.
He smiled in return, pleased to note the change in her, even if it were
but momentary.
"Safe in fold to-night, I hope," he answered, as a gust of wind blew the
rain in vicious volleys against the panes.
"Tell me," she said presently. "How did Lord Kneedrock look the day you
saw him at Bath?"
"Vexed," he answered. "Beastly angry, in fact."
"I'm sure he did. It was unkind of me not to see him, and to make an
exception of you."
"That's altogether a matter of viewpoint. I think it was most kind."
"Of course you do. Men are all selfish animals."
"I think _that_ is unkind," he said reprovingly. "I'm not selfish where
your happiness is concerned. I'd go to the ends of the earth to serve
you, Nina."
"With another man left behind?"
"Yes. Even with another man left behind."
"That's what Kneedrock did," she told him. "And--and I can never forget
it."
"And he can never forgive it," Andrews added.
Then he went away, and Nina passed another sleepless night.
But he was back the next day by noon, to find her sitting in the same
chair, with Tara lying at her feet, and the rain still beating its
dismal tattoo on the window-panes. The room was in dusk.
She saw in his face that what she had feared, yet hoped against, he had
brought her. She needed no word to confirm the dire thing told her by
the duke. Poor Andrews seemed weighed down by the burden of his tidings.
His expression was as grim and dour as the day.
"But do they know who he is?" It was her first question, and it relieved
him of the bald announcement he had dreaded.
"They don't," he answered quickly, glad to get the first plunge over.
"They haven't the faintest notion, apparently. I asked particularly."
"Poor Nibbetts," Nina sighed. "He doesn't look the typical nobleman. Yet
when he was a young man there wasn't a smarter in all London."
"That South Sea life took it out of him, I suppose."
"And the butchering the Boers gave him."
"I wonder if his present fix can't be traced back to that?" suggested
her friend, leaning down and patting the staghound's head. "There's such
a thing as traumatic insanity, you know."
She seemed to seize on this alternative possibility with eagerness.
"He has never been the same since he came back," she said. "That is
certain. He was quite, quite different before he went to South Africa."
Then a question occurred to her, and she asked: "Has he shown any
violence?"
"Not at the gardens. But they had heard of an assault he made outside
the gates."
"Yes, I know. He attacked his valet for following him and daring to
interfere."
"He has been very quiet in the tiger-house--except for that mumbling
talk of his to the tigress. But that attracts attention--collects a
crowd, you know--and they have to ask him to move on."
"And does he?"
"Oh, yes! Very peaceably. But he's back again in a little while, and
then the same thing has to be repeated."
"Poor Hal!" sighed Nina, her locked hands tightly gripped.
"They hope he has gone away to stay, one of the guards told me. Ever
since the row outside, they fear he may indulge in some outbreak in the
grounds. There is talk of refusing him admission."
"If they only would," she said. And then, abruptly: "But you haven't
told me of Mr. Widdicombe. Did you see him?"
Gerald smiled. "Yes, oh yes," he answered. "I saw him. But you were
right. He wouldn't talk. He wouldn't open his mouth."
"He just sat dumb?"
"He turned to his desk and touched a bell. A clerk came and--that was
all."
"You told him that _I_ wished to know?" There was something imperious in
her emphasis.
"I did--yes." And again he questioned why that should bear any weight.
Although he did not voice it, she read it in his look.
"I'm his near kin, you know," she explained. "We are cousins."
"I understand," he told her, but he thought the explanation far short of
adequate.
She got up and crossed the room, and from a drawer in an escritoire took
out a small photograph, which she passed to Andrews.
"That was taken in 1900," she said.
It was easy to recognize her in the slender, tallish girl, with masses
of fair hair, and clad in the simplest of white frocks. But he would
never have known the slim young man with the waxed mustache for Lord
Kneedrock, had she not told him. He wore outing flannels and a blazer of
wide stripes, and his arm was about her youthful shoulders.
"It was taken at Henley," she said, "just for a lark. Look at the back."
He turned it over and found written there in pencil: "'Arry and his
'Arriet," in a man's hand.
"Hal used always to call me Harriet," she explained, and in spite of
her, her voice shook.
He looked at her sharply as he handed it back, remembering just then a
certain night in Simla when she told him that she had met her match and
her mate in one.
"Does Widdicombe know about this?" he asked.
"I very much doubt that there is anything in Lord Kneedrock's life which
Mr. Widdicombe doesn't know," was her answer.
She returned to her chair, but Gerald Andrews remained standing. "Is
there anything else I can do?" he inquired. "If not, I'll--"
"You can stay for luncheon," she interrupted.
He thanked her, but declined.
"I've a little business to look after while I'm up," he added, "and I
should be back in Bath to-night."
"You've been so good," she said, giving him her hand. "I shall miss you
awfully. You'll be up again soon, won't you, Gerald?"
The door-bell echoed, and at the same instant Tara lifted his head and
growled. Neither seemed to notice.
The man drew her closer and placed his disengaged hand on her shoulder.
"I'd give the world, Nina," he said, "to make this thing lighter for
you. If I could only help in some real way!"
"You do; you do," she assured him. "Your sympathy is everything to me."
There was a step in the passage, but neither heard it. For it was at
that moment that he caught her almost roughly in his arms and crushed
her close to him.
And then the door opened, and Kneedrock was gazing at them from the
threshold.