Vera and her mysterious friend were together, calling in the most
matter-of-fact way possible, and just as though nothing had happened!
It seemed incredible!
All at once a dreadful thought occurred to me that made me catch my
breath. Was it possible that my love was an actress, in the sense that
she was acting a part? Had she cruelly deceived me when she had
declared so earnestly that she loved me? The reflection that, were she
practising deception, she would not have come to see me thus openly with
the man with the black beard, relieved my feelings only a little. For
how came she to be with Davies at all? And again, who was this man
Davies? Also that telephone message a fortnight previously, how could I
account for it under the circumstances?
"Oh, come to me--do come to me! I am in such trouble," my love had
cried so piteously, and then had added: "You alone can help me."
Some one else, apparently, must have helped her. Could it have been
this big, dark man?
And was he, in consequence, supplanting me in her affection? The
thought held me breathless.
At times I am something of a philosopher, though my relatives laugh when
I tell them so, and reply, "Not a philosopher, only a well-meaning
fellow, and extremely good-natured"--a description I detest. Realising
now the uselessness of worrying over the matter, I decided to make no
further move, but to sit quiet and await developments.
"If you worry," I often tell my friends, "it won't in the least help to
avert impending disaster, while if what you worry about never comes to
pass, you have made yourself unhappy to no purpose."
A platitude? Possibly. But two-thirds of the words of wisdom uttered
by great men, and handed down as tradition to a worshipping posterity,
are platitudes of the most commonplace type, if you really come to
analyse them.
Time hung heavily. It generally ends by hanging heavily upon a man
without occupation. But put yourself for a moment in my place. I had
lost my love, and those days of inactivity and longing were doubly
tedious because I ached to bestir myself somehow, anyhow, to clear up a
mystery which, though gradually fading from the mind of a public ever
athirst for fresh sensation, was actively alive in my own thoughts--the
one thought, indeed, ever present in my mind. Why had the Thorolds so
suddenly and mysteriously disappeared?
Thus it occurred to me, two days after Davies and Vera had called at my
flat, to stroll down into Belgravia and interview the caretaker at 102,
Belgrave Street. Possibly by this time, I reflected, he might have seen
Sir Charles Thorold, or heard from him.
When I had rung three times, the door slowly opened to the length of its
chain, and I think quite the queerest-looking little old man I had ever
set eyes on, peered out. He gazed with his sharp, beady eyes up into my
face for a moment or two, then asked, in a broken quavering voice--
"Are you another newspaper gen'leman?"
"Oh, no," I answered, laughing, for I guessed at once how he must have
been harassed by reporters, and I could sympathise with him. "I am not
a journalist--I'm only a gentleman."
Of course he was too old to note the satire, but the fact that I wore a
silk hat and a clean collar, seemed to satisfy him that I must be a
person of some consequence, and when I had assured him that I meant him
no ill, but that, on the contrary, I might have something to tell him
that he would like to hear, he shut the door, and I heard his trembling
old hands remove the chain.
"And how long is it since Sir Charles was last here?" I said to him,
when he had shown me into his little room on the ground floor, where a
kettle purred on a gas-stove. "I know him well, you know; I was staying
at Houghton Park when he disappeared."
He looked me up and down, surprised and apparently much interested.
"Were you indeed, sir?" he exclaimed. "Well, now--well, well!"
"Why don't you sit down and make yourself comfortable, my old friend," I
went on affably. I drew forward his armchair, and he sank into it with
a grunt of relief.
"You are a very kind gen'leman, you are, very kind indeed," he said, in
a tone that betrayed true gratitude. "Ah! I've known gen'lemen in my
time, and I know a gen'leman when I sees one, I do."
"What part of Norfolk do you come from?" I asked, as I took a seat near
him, for I knew the Norfolk brogue quite well.
He looked at me and grinned.
"Well, now, that's strange you knowing I come from Norfolk! But it's
true. Oh, yes, it is right. I'm a Norfolk man. I was born in Diss. I
mind the time my father--"
"Yes, yes," I interrupted, "we'll talk about that presently," for I
could see that, once allowed to start on the subject of his relatives
and his native county, he would talk on for an hour. "What I have come
here this afternoon to talk to you about is Sir Charles Thorold. When
was he last here?"
"It will be near two years come Michaelmas," he answered, without an
instant's hesitation. "And since then I haven't set eyes on him--I
haven't."
"And has this house been shut up all the time?"
"Ay, all that time. I mind the time my father used to tell me--"
I damned his father under my breath, and quickly stopped him by asking
who paid him his wages.
"My wages? Oh, Sir Charles' lawyers, Messrs. Spink and Peters, of
Lincoln's Inn, pays me my wages. But they are not going to pay me any
more. No. They are not going to pay me any more now."
"Not going to pay you any more? What do you mean?"
"Give me notice to quit, they did, a week ago come Saturday."
"But why?"
"Orders from Sir Charles, they said. Would you like to see their
letter, sir?"
"I should, if you have it by you."