Indecision had never been one of Francis Ledsam's faults, but four times
during the following day he wrote out a carefully worded telegraphic
message to Mrs. Oliver Hilditch, 10 b, Hill Street, regretting his
inability to dine that night, and each time he destroyed it. He carried
the first message around Richmond golf course with him, intending to
dispatch his caddy with it immediately on the conclusion of the round.
The fresh air, however, and the concentration required by the game,
seemed to dispel the nervous apprehensions with which he had anticipâtéd
his visit, and over an aperitif in the club bar he tore the telegram
into small pieces and found himself even able to derive a certain
half-fearful pleasure from the thought of meeting again the woman who,
together with her terrible story, had never for one moment been out of
his thoughts. Andrew Wilmore, who had observed his action, spoke of it
as they settled down to lunch.
“So you are going to keep your engagement tonight, Francis?” he
observed.
The latter nodded.
“After all, why not?” he asked, a little defiantly. “It ought to be
interesting.”
“Well, there's nothing of the sordid criminal, at any rate, about Oliver
Hilditch,” Wilmore declared. “Neither, if one comes to think of it, does
his wife appear to be the prototype of suffering virtue. I wonder if you
are wise to go, Francis?”
“Why not?” the man who had asked himself that question a dozen times
already, demanded.
“Because,” Wilmore replied coolly, “underneath that steely hardness
of manner for which your profession is responsible, you have a vein
of sentiment, of chivalrous sentiment, I should say, which some day or
other is bound to get you into trouble. The woman is beautiful enough
to turn any one's head. As a matter of fact, I believe that you are more
than half in love with her already.”
Francis Ledsam sat where the sunlight fell upon his strong, forceful
face, shone, too, upon the table with its simple but pleasant
appointments, upon the tankard of beer by his side, upon the plate of
roast beef to which he was already doing ample justice. He laughed with
the easy confidence of a man awakened from some haunting nightmare,
relieved to find his feet once more firm upon the ground.
“I have been a fool to take the whole matter so seriously, Andrew,”
he declared. “I expect to walk back to Clarges Street to-night,
disillusioned. The man will probably present me with a gold pencil-case,
and the woman--”
“Well, what about the woman?” Wilmore asked, after a brief pause.
“Oh, I don't know!” Francis declared, a little impatiently. “The woman
is the mystery, of course. Probably my brain was a little over-excited
when I came out of Court, and what I imagined to be an epic was nothing
more than a tissue of exaggerations from a disappointed wife. I'm sure
I'm doing the right thing to go there.... What about a four-ball this
afternoon, Andrew?”
The four-ball match was played and won in normal fashion. The two men
returned to town together afterwards, Wilmore to the club and Francis to
his rooms in Clarges Street to prepare for dinner. At a few minutes to
eight he rang the bell of number 10 b, Hill Street, and found his host
and hostess awaiting him in the small drawing-room into which he was
ushered. It seemed to him that the woman, still colourless, again
marvellously gowned, greeted him coldly. His host, however, was almost
too effusive. There was no other guest, but the prompt announcement of
dinner dispelled what might have been a few moments of embarrassment
after Oliver Hilditch's almost too cordial greeting. The woman laid her
fingers upon her guest's coat-sleeve. The trio crossed the little hall
almost in silence.
Dinner was served in a small white Georgian dining-room, with every
appurtenance of almost Sybaritic luxury. The only light in the room
was thrown upon the table by two purple-shaded electric lamps, and the
servants who waited seemed to pass backwards and forwards like shadows
in some mysterious twilight--even the faces of the three diners
themselves were out of the little pool of light until they leaned
forward. The dinner was chosen with taste and restraint, the wines were
not only costly but rare. A watchful butler, attended now and then by
a trim parlour-maid, superintended the service. Only once, when she
ordered a bowl of flowers removed from the table, did their mistress
address either of them. Conversation after the first few amenities
speedily became almost a monologue. One man talked whilst the others
listened, and the man who talked was Oliver Hilditch. He possessed the
rare gift of imparting colour and actuality in a few phrases to the
strange places of which he spoke, of bringing the very thrill of strange
happenings into the shadowy room. It seemed that there was scarcely a
country of the world which he had not visited, a country, that is to
say, where men congregate, for he admitted from the first that he was a
city worshipper, that the empty places possessed no charm for him.
“I am not even a sportsman,” he confessed once, half apologetically, in
reply to a question from his guest. “I have passed down the great rivers
of the world without a thought of salmon, and I have driven through the
forest lands and across the mountains behind a giant locomotive, without
a thought of the beasts which might be lurking there, waiting to be
killed. My only desire has been to reach the next place where men and
women were.”
“Irrespective of nationality?” Francis queried.
“Absolutely. I have never minded much of what race--I have the trick
of tongues rather strangely developed--but I like the feeling of human
beings around me. I like the smell and sound and atmosphere of a great
city. Then all my senses are awake, but life becomes almost turgid in my
veins during the dreary hours of passing from one place to another.”
“Do you rule out scenery as well as sport from amongst the joys of
travel?” Francis enquired.
“I am ashamed to make such a confession,” his host answered, “but I
have never lingered for a single unnecessary moment to look at the most
wonderful landscape in the world. On the other hand, I have lounged for
hours in the narrowest streets of Pekin, in the markets of Shanghai,
along Broadway in New York, on the boulevards in Paris, outside the
Auditorium in Chicago. These are the obvious places where humanity
presses the thickest, but I know of others. Some day we will talk of
them.”
Francis, too, although that evening, through sheer lack of sympathy,
he refused to admit it, shared to some extent Hilditch's passionate
interest in his fellow-creatures, and notwithstanding the strange
confusion of thought into which he had been thrown during the last
twenty-four hours, he felt something of the pungency of life, the thrill
of new and appealing surroundings, as he sat in his high-backed chair,
sipping his wonderful wine, eating almost mechanically what was set
before him, fascinated through all his being by his strange company.
For three days he had cast occasional glances at this man, seated in
the criminal dock with a gaoler on either side of him, his fine,
nervous features gaining an added distinction from the sordidness of his
surroundings. Now, in the garb of civilisation, seated amidst luxury to
which he was obviously accustomed, with a becoming light upon his face
and this strange, fascinating flow of words proceeding always from his
lips, the man, from every external point of view, seemed amongst the
chosen ones of the world. The contrast was in itself amazing. And then
the woman! Francis looked at her but seldom, and when he did it was with
a curious sense of mental disturbance; poignant but unanalysable.
It was amazing to see her here, opposite the man of whom she had told
him that ghastly story, mistress of his house, to all appearance his
consort, apparently engrossed in his polished conversation, yet with
that subtle withholding of her real self which Francis rather imagined
than felt, and which somehow seemed to imply her fierce resentment of
her husband's re-entry into the arena of life. It was a situation so
strange that Francis, becoming more and more subject to its influence,
was inclined to wonder whether he had not met with some accident on
his way from the Court, and whether this was not one of the heated
nightmares following unconsciousness.
“Tell me,” he asked his host, during one of the brief pauses in the
conversation, “have you ever tried to analyse this interest of yours
in human beings and crowded cities, this hatred of solitude and empty
spaces?”
Oliver Hilditch smiled thoughtfully, and gazed at a salted almond which
he was just balancing between the tips of his fingers.
“I think,” he said simply, “it is because I have no soul.”