Tallente was seated at breakfast a few mornings later when his wife paid
him an unexpected visit. She responded to his greeting with a cold nod,
refused the coffee which he offered her and the easy-chair which he
pushed forward to the fire.
"I got your letter, Andrew," she said, "in which you proposed to call
upon me this afternoon. I am leaving town. I am on my way back to New
York, as a matter of fact, and I shall have left the hotel by midday, so
you see I have come to visit you instead."
"It is very kind," he answered.
She shrugged her shoulders and looked disparagingly around the plainly
furnished man's sitting room.
"Not much altered here," she remarked. "It looks just as it did when I
used to come to tea with you before we were married."
"The neighbourhood is a conservative one," he replied. "Still, I must
confess that I am glad I never gave the rooms up. I don't think that
nature intended me to dwell in palaces."
"Perhaps not," she agreed, a little insolently. "It is a habit of yours
to think and live parochially. Now what did you want of me, please?"
"There is a scheme on foot," he began, "to bring about my political
ruin."
"You don't mean to tell me," she exclaimed, with a sudden light in her
eyes, "that you, my well-behaved Andrew, have been playing around? You
are not going to be a corespondent or any-thing of that sort?"
"I used the word 'political,'" he reminded her coldly. "You would not
understand the situation, but its interest and my danger centres round a
certain document which was stolen from my study at Martinhoe on or just
before the day of my arrival from London last August."
"How dull!" she murmured.
"That document," he went on, "was purloined by Anthony Palliser from the
safe in my study. It was either upon him when he disappeared, or he
disposed of it on the afternoon of my arrival to a political opponent of
mine--James Miller."
"I had so hoped there was a lady in the case," she yawned.
"If you will give me your attention for one moment longer," he begged,
"it will be all I ask. I want you to tell me, first of all, whether
James Miller called at the Manor that afternoon and saw Palliser,
whether any one called who might have been helping him, or--"
"Well?"
"Whether you have heard anything of Palliser since his disappearance?"
She looked at him hardly.
"You have brought me here to answer these questions?"
"Pardon me," he reminded her, "your coming was entirely your own idea."
"But why should you expect that I should give you information?" she
demanded. "You refused to give me the thing I wanted more than anything
in life and you have thrown me off like an old glove. If you are
threatened with what you call political ruin, why on earth should I
intervene to prevent it?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"You take a severe and I venture to believe a prejudiced view of the
situation between us," he replied. "I never promised you that I would
make you a peeress. Such a thing never entered into my head. Every
pledge I made to you when we were married, I kept. You cannot say the
same."
"The man's point of view, I suppose," she scoffed. "Well, I'll tell you
what I know, in exchange for a little piece of information from you,
which is--what do you know about Anthony Palliser's disappearance?"
He was silent for several moments. The frown on his forehead deepened.
"Your very question," he observed, "answers one of the queries which
have been troubling me."
"I have no objection to telling you," she said, "that since that night I
have neither seen nor heard of Palliser."
"What happened that night was simple," Tallente explained calmly;
"perhaps you would call it primitive. You left the room. I beckoned
Palliser to follow me outside. The car was still in the avenue and the
servants were taking my luggage in. The spot where we stood on the
terrace, too, was exactly underneath your window. I took him by the arm
and I led him along the little path towards the cliff. When we came to
the open space by the wall, I let him go. I asked him if he had
anything to say. He had nothing. I thrashed him."
"You bully!"
Tallente raised his eyebrows.
"Palliser was twenty years younger than I and of at least equal build
and strength," he said. "It was not my fault that he seemed unable to
defend himself."
"But his disappearance--tell me about that?"
"We were within a few feet of the edge of the cliff. I struck him
harder, Perhaps, than I had intended, and he went over. I stood there
and hooked down, but I could see nothing. I heard the crashing of some
bushes, and after that--silence. I even called out to him, but there
was no reply. Some time later, Robert and I searched the cliff and the
bay below for his body. We discovered nothing."
"It was high tide that night!" she cried. "You know very well that he
must have been drowned!"
"I have answered your question," Tallente replied quietly.
There was a cold fury in her eyes. The veins seemed to stand out on her
clenched, worn hands. She looked at him with all the suppressed passion
of a creature impotent yet fiercely anxious to strike.
"I shall give information," she cried. "You shall be charged with his
murder!"
Tallente shook his head.
"You will waste your time, Stella," he said. "For one thing, a woman
may not give evidence against her husband. Another thing, there cannot
very well be a charge for murder unsupported by the production of the
body. And for a third thing, I should deny the whole story."
Her fury abated, though the hate in her eyes remained.
"I think," she declared, "that you are the most coldblooded creature I
ever knew."
The irony of the situation gripped at him. He rose suddenly to his
feet, filled with an overwhelming desire to end it.
"Stella," he said, "to me you always seemed, especially during our last
few years together, cold and utterly indifferent. I know now that I was
mistaken. In your way you cared for Palliser. You starved me. My own
fault, you would say? Perhaps. But listen. There is a way into every
man's heart and a way into every woman's, but sometimes that way lies
hidden except to the one right person, and you weren't the right person
for me, and I wasn't the right person for you. Now answer the rest of
my question and let us part."
"Tell me," she asked, with almost insolent irony, "do you believe that
there could ever have been a right person for you?"
"My God, yes!" he answered, with a sudden fire. "I suffer the tortures
of the damned sometimes because I missed my chance! There! I'm telling
you this just so that you shall think a little differently, if you can.
You and I between us have made an infernal mess of things. It was
chiefly my fault. And as regards Palliser--well, I am sorry. Only the
fellow--he may have been lovable to you, but he was a coward and a sneak
to me--and he paid. I am sorry."
She seemed a little dazed.
"You mean to tell me, Andrew," she persisted, "that there is really some
one you care for, care for in the big way--a woman who means as much to
you as your place in Parliament--your ambition?"
"More," he declared vigorously. "There isn't a single thing I have or
ever have had in life which I wouldn't give for the chance--just a
chance--"
"And she cares for you?"
"I think that she would," he answered. "She has been brought up in a
very old-fashioned school. She knows of you."
Stella smiled a little bitterly.
"Well," she said, "I suppose I am a brute, but I am glad to know that
you can suffer. I hope you will suffer; it makes you seem more human
anyhow. But in return for your confidence I will answer the other part
of your question. The man Miller was at the Manor that afternoon.
Palliser confessed to me that he had given him some important document."
"Given him!"
"Well, sold him, then. Tony hadn't got a shilling in the world and he
would never take a halfpenny from me. He had to have money. He told me
about it that night before you came. Miller gave him five thousand
pounds for it--secret service money from one of the branches of his
party. Now you know all about it."
"Yes, I know all about it," Tallente assented, a little bitterly. "You
can take your trip to America without a single regret, Stella. I shall
certainly never be a Cabinet Minister again, much less Prime Minister of
England. Miller can use those papers to my undoing."
She shrugged her shoulders as she turned towards the door.
"You are like the fool," she said, "who tried to build the tower of his
life without cement. All very well for experiments, Andrew, when one is
young and one can rebuild, but you are a little old for that now, aren't
you, and all your brain and all your efforts, and every thought you have
been capable of since the day I met you have been given to that one
thing. You'll find it a little difficult to start all over
again.--Don't--trouble. I know the way down and I have a car waiting.
You must take up golf and make a water garden at Martinhoe. I don't
know whether you deserve that I should wish you good fortune. I can't
make up my mind. But I will--and good-by!"
She left him in the end quite suddenly. He had not even time to open
the door for her. Tallente looked out of the window and watched her
drive away. His feelings were in a curiously numb state. For Stella he
had no feeling whatever. Her confirmation of Palliser's perfidy had
awakened in him no new resentment. Only in a vague way he began to
realise that his forebodings of the last few days were founded upon a
reality. Whether Palliser lived or was dead, it was too late for him to
undo the mischief he had done.
Tallente took up the receiver and asked for Dartrey's number. In half
an hour he was on his way to see him.