It was after leaving Miss Daisy Hyslop's flat that the event to which
Francis Ledsam had been looking forward more than anything else in the
world, happened. It came about entirely by chance. There were no taxis
in the Strand. Francis himself had finished work for the day, and
feeling disinclined for his usual rubber of bridge, he strolled
homewards along the Mall. At the corner of Green Park, he came face to
face with the woman who for the last few months had scarcely been out of
his thoughts. Even in that first moment he realised to his pain that she
would have avoided him if she could. They met, however, where the path
narrowed, and he left her no chance to avoid him. That curious impulse
of conventionality which opens a conversation always with cut and dried
banalities, saved them perhaps from a certain amount of embarrassment.
Without any conscious suggestion, they found themselves walking side by
side.
“I have been wanting to see you very much indeed,” he said. “I even went
so far as to wonder whether I dared call.”
“Why should you?” she asked. “Our acquaintance began and ended in
tragedy. There is scarcely any purpose in carrying it further.”
He looked at her for a moment before replying. She was wearing black,
but scarcely the black of a woman who sorrows. She was still frigidly
beautiful, redolent, in all the details of her toilette, of that
almost negative perfection which he had learnt to expect from her. She
suggested to him still that same sense of aloofness from the actualities
of life.
“I prefer not to believe that it is ended,” he protested. “Have you so
many friends that you have no room for one who has never consciously
done you any harm?”
She looked at him with some faint curiosity in her immobile features.
“Harm? No! On the contrary, I suppose I ought to thank you for your
evidence at the inquest.”
“Some part of it was the truth,” he replied.
“I suppose so,” she admitted drily. “You told it very cleverly.”
He looked her in the eyes.
“My profession helped me to be a good witness,” he said. “As for the
gist of my evidence, that was between my conscience and myself.”
“Your conscience?” she repeated. “Are there really men who possess such
things?”
“I hope you will discover that for yourself some day,” he answered.
“Tell me your plans? Where are you living?”
“For the present with my father in Curzon Street.”
“With Sir Timothy Brast?”
She assented.
“You know him?” she asked indifferently.
“Very slightly,” Francis replied. “We talked together, some nights ago,
at Soto's Restaurant. I am afraid that I did not make a very favourable
impression upon him. I gathered, too, that he has somewhat eccentric
tastes.”
“I do not see a great deal of my father,” she said. “We met, a few
months ago, for the first time since my marriage, and things have been a
little difficult between us--just at first. He really scarcely ever puts
in an appearance at Curzon Street. I dare say you have heard that he
makes a hobby of an amazing country house which he has down the river.”
“The Walled House?” he ventured.
She nodded.
“I see you have heard of it. All London, they tell me, gossips about the
entertainments there.”
“Are they really so wonderful?” he asked.
“I have never been to one,” she replied. “As a matter of fact, I have
spent scarcely any time in England since my marriage. My husband, as I
remember he told you, was fond of travelling.”
Notwithstanding the warm spring air he was conscious of a certain
chilliness. Her level, indifferent tone seemed to him almost abnormally
callous. A horrible realisation flashed for a moment in his brain. She
was speaking of the man whom she had killed!
“Your father overheard a remark of mine,” Francis told her. “I was at
Soto's with a friend--Andrew Wilmore, the novelist--and to tell you the
truth we were speaking of the shock I experienced when I realised that
I had been devoting every effort of which I was capable, to saving the
life of--shall we say a criminal? Your father heard me say, in rather
a flamboyant manner, perhaps, that in future I declared war against all
crime and all criminals.”
She smiled very faintly, a smile which had in it no single element of
joy or humour.
“I can quite understand my father intervening,” she said. “He poses
as being rather a patron of artistically-perpetrated crime. Sue is his
favourite author, and I believe that he has exceedingly grim ideas as to
duelling and fighting generally. He was in prison once for six months
at New Orleans for killing a man who insulted my mother. Nothing in the
world would ever have convinced him that he had not done a perfectly
legitimate thing.”
“I am expecting to find him quite an interesting study, when I know him
better,” Francis pronounced. “My only fear is that he will count me an
unfriendly person and refuse to have anything to do with me.”
“I am not at all sure,” she said indifferently, “that it would not be
very much better for you if he did.”
“I cannot admit that,” he answered, smiling. “I think that our paths
in life are too far apart for either of us to influence the other. You
don't share his tastes, do you?”
“Which ones?” she asked, after a moment's silence.
“Well, boxing for one,” he replied. “They tell me that he is the
greatest living patron of the ring, both here and in America.”
“I have never been to a fight in my life,” she confessed. “I hope that I
never may.”
“I can't go so far as that,” he declared, “but boxing isn't altogether
one of my hobbies. Can't we leave your father and his tastes alone for
the present? I would rather talk about--ourselves. Tell me what you care
about most in life?”
“Nothing,” she answered listlessly.
“But that is only a phase,” he persisted. “You have had terrible trials,
I know, and they must have affected your outlook on life, but you are
still young, and while one is young life is always worth having.”
“I thought so once,” she assented. “I don't now.”
“But there must be--there will be compensations,” he assured her. “I
know that just now you are suffering from the reaction--after all you
have gone through. The memory of that will pass.”
“The memory of what I have gone through will never pass,” she answered.
There was a moment's intense silence, a silence pregnant with
reminiscent drama. The little room rose up before his memory--the
woman's hopeless, hating eyes, the quivering thread of steel, the dead
man's mocking words. He seemed at that moment to see into the recesses
of her mind. Was it remorse that troubled her, he wondered? Did she lack
strength to realise that in that half-hour at the inquest he had placed
on record for ever his judgment of her deed? Even to think of it now was
morbid. Although he would never have confessed it even to himself, there
was growing daily in his mind some idea of reward. She had never thanked
him--he hoped that she never would--but he had surely a right to claim
some measure of her thoughts, some light place in her life.
“Please look at me,” he begged, a little abruptly.
She turned her head in some surprise. Francis was almost handsome in the
clear Spring sunlight, his face alight with animation, his deep-set
grey eyes full of amused yet anxious solicitude. Even as she appreciated
these things and became dimly conscious of his eager interest, her
perturbation seemed to grow.
“Well?” she ventured.
“Do I look like a person who knew what he was talking about?” he asked.
“On the whole, I should say that you did,” she admitted.
“Very well, then,” he went on cheerfully, “believe me when I say that
the shadow which depresses you all the time now will pass. I say this
confidently,” he added, his voice softening, “because I hope to be
allowed to help. Haven't you guessed that I am very glad indeed to see
you again?”
She came to a sudden standstill. They had just passed through Lansdowne
Passage and were in the quiet end of Curzon Street.
“But you must not talk to me like that!” she expostulated.
“Why not?” he demanded. “We have met under strange and untoward
circumstances, but are you so very different from other women?”
For a single moment she seemed infinitely more human, startled, a
little nervous, exquisitely sympathetic to an amazing and unexpected
impression. She seemed to look with glad but terrified eyes towards the
vision of possible things--and then to realise that it was but a trick
of the fancy and to come shivering back to the world of actualities.
“I am very different,” she said quietly. “I have lived my life. What I
lack in years has been made up to me in horror. I have no desire now
but to get rid of this aftermath of years as smoothly and quickly as
possible. I do not wish any man, Mr. Ledsam, to talk to me as you are
doing.”
“You will not accept my friendship?”
“It is impossible,” she replied.
“May I be allowed to call upon you?” he went on, doggedly.
“I do not receive visitors,” she answered.
They were walking slowly up Curzon Street now. She had given him every
opportunity to leave her, opportunities to which he was persistently
blind. Her obstinacy had been a shock to him.
“I am sorry,” he said, “but I cannot accept my dismissal like this. I
shall appeal to your father. However much he may dislike me, he has at
least common-sense.”
She looked at him with a touch of the old horror in her
coldly-questioning eyes.
“In your way you have been kind to me,” she admitted. “Let me in return
give you a word of advice. Let me beg you to have nothing whatever to
do with my father, in friendship or in enmity. Either might be equally
disastrous. Either, in the long run, is likely to cost you dear.”
“If that is your opinion of your father, why do you live with him?” he
asked.
She had become entirely callous again. Her smile, with its mocking
quality, reminded him for a moment of the man whom they were discussing.
“Because I am a luxury and comfort-loving parasite,” she answered
deliberately, “because my father gladly pays my accounts at Lucille and
Worth and Reville, because I have never learnt to do without things.
And please remember this. My father, so far as I am concerned, has no
faults. He is a generous and courteous companion. Nevertheless, number
70 b, Curzon Street is no place for people who desire to lead normal
lives.”
And with that she was gone. Her gesture of dismissal was so complete
and final that he had no courage for further argument. He had lost her
almost as soon as he had found her.