"Jealous!" I cried with affected nonchalance. "Why should I be?"
"Well--I ought, of course, to have told you before," she answered. "But
he's such a good friend of ours, you know."
Good friend. All the suspicions I held regarding him flashed across my
mind. Why had he pretended to be an invalid on that day I had sat at
his bedside, and yet afterwards had dined at Hatchett's? Why was he
ever inquisitive regarding our secret experiments, and why did he appear
to possess such unusual knowledge of coming events?
"Yes," I remarked after a pause. "He is, no doubt, a good friend."
I saw that I could learn more by disarming suspicion than by appearing
ungenerous.
"You don't mind me going to a _matinee_ with him, do you, Claude?" she
asked frankly. "Of course, if it has annoyed you, I won't go again.
But mother said she thought a theatre would be a pleasant relaxation for
me, now that we can't go out at night on account of the darkened streets
and the bad winter weather."
"The darkened streets seem to make no difference to pleasure-going," I
said bitterly, and purposely disregarding her first question. "Though
we are at war--though thousands upon thousands of our poor brave fellows
have been killed or maimed in the defence of their homes and their loved
ones, yet the London public are still the same. Nothing seems to
disturb them. Bond Street, with all its fripperies, is still in full
swing: the drapers everywhere are paying big dividends--money is being
squandered in luxuries by those who have never previously known such
things; jewellers are flourishing, and extravagance runs riot through
the land. Men and women go nightly to revues and join in rollicking
choruses, even while the death-rattle sounds in the throats of Britain's
bravest sons. Ah! Roseye," I said. "It is all too awful. What I fear
is that we are riding gaily for a fall."
"No," she said. "I agree in a sense with all you say. But we are not
riding for a fall, so long as we have brave men ready to sacrifice their
lives in Britain's cause. You, Claude, are one of those," she added,
looking straight into my face with an open, frank expression--that
love-look which can never be feigned, either by man or by woman.
In that second I realised that at least my suspicion that she had any
secret affection for Lionel Eastwell was groundless.
Yet I was, nevertheless, annoyed that he should still mislead her
parents by expressions of friendship. True, when I came to examine and
to analyse my doubts, I could discover no real and actual foundation for
them. Perhaps it was an intuition that possessed me--a strange
half-formed belief that Eastwell, though such a cheerful companion, such
a real good fellow, and so popular with all the flying-boys, was not
exactly of the truly patriotic type which he represented himself to be.
For that reason alone I inwardly objected to Roseye associating with
him, yet as he was such a warmly welcomed friend of the family, it was
extremely difficult for me to move in any antagonistic spirit.
Within myself I had a fierce and desperate struggle, yet long ago I had
realised that if I intended to win I must not show the slightest sign of
anger or of suspicion.
So, as we sat there together--gazing across the sloping lawn, so
melancholy in that falling December twilight, yet so picturesque and gay
on those summer evenings as I had often known it--I crushed down the
apprehension that had arisen within me, and laughed gaily with my dainty
well-beloved.
Still the facts--the mysterious inexplicable facts--remained. Was it
possible that my love desired again to assist in the completion of our
experiments in order to know the result of them--and perhaps to betray
them?
No. I could not--even in my inward anger at the knowledge that she had
spent the previous afternoon with the man I suspected--bring myself to
believe that she was really acting in contradiction to the interests of
the country.
Somebody has truly said that love is blind. Well, I loved Roseye. And
my blindness had been a very pleasant and delightful affliction up to
that tragic day of her disappearance.
Through those weeks when her mind had remained unbalanced and unhinged,
she had never once made any statement nor had she ever inadvertently
admitted anything which might reveal the truth as to where she had been,
or the identity of the person whom she held in greatest terror--that
Woman with the Leopard's Eyes.
With all the cunning I possessed I had sought to glean from her some
fact, any fact however vague, concerning those weeks when she had been
missing, but beyond what I have written in these pages, I could gather
no single incident.
I was but an ordinary man--one whose father had risen in the medical
profession to grasp one of its plums. From being a ne'er-do-well and
idler, I had taken up aviation and, after much perseverance, had learned
to fly. I suppose I was gifted with ordinary intelligence, and that
intelligence had shown me that, now we were at war, the enemy had placed
upon the whole country that secret Hand, eager and clutching, to effect
and secure our undoing. Its finger-prints, indelible and unmistakable,
remained wherever one sought them.
That Hand had been upon me when I had crashed to earth with a wooden
bolt in my machine in place of one of steel.
But whether the Hand had really been placed upon Roseye was a problem
which utterly defied solution.
That she had suffered had been vividly apparent, yet her absolute and
fixed refusal to say anything, to admit anything, or to make any charge
against anyone, was, in itself, an astounding feature of what was an
extremely curious situation.
I remained that afternoon at Burford Bridge just as dumbfounded and
mystified as I had been at that moment when Theed had opened the door of
my sitting-room and she had returned from what, in her own words, had
been a living tomb.
Why a living tomb? Who had prepared the trap--if trap there had been?
Who was the unknown woman, the very mention of whom terrified her--the
Woman with the Leopard's Eyes?
Though we sat there and laughed together--for I had affected, I hope
successfully, an utter disregard of any suspicion or jealousy of
Eastwell--I gazed upon her, and I saw that she had grown nervous and
anxious.
Why?
It seemed to me that, with her woman's innate cleverness and cunning--
which by the way is never outmatched by that of the mere man--she was
reading my own innermost thoughts. She knew my suspicions, and her
intention, at all hazards, was to conceal from me some bitter and
perhaps disgraceful truth.
This thought aroused within me a relentless hatred of the fellow
Eastwell. Nevertheless, once again when I came to examine the actual
facts, I could discover really nothing tangible--nothing which ought to
lead me, with any degree of right or justice, to an adverse decision.
I had revealed much to Inspector Barton before Roseye's disappearance.
I had told him of my suspicions of Eastwell, but I suppose he had--as
natural to, an investigator of crime--regarded those suspicions as the
natural outcome of a man's jealousy. But they were not, because I had
never been jealous of the man--not until we sat there on the lawn before
the hotel, and she had told me how she had spent an afternoon at the
theatre in his company.
As a matter of fact jealousy had never entered my head. Previously I
had always regarded Eastwell as quite a good fellow, full of the true
stamina of a patriot. He had been, I knew, full of schemes for the
future of aviation in England ever since he had taken his first flap at
the aerodrome. Once, indeed, he had serious thoughts, in the pre-war
days, of putting up as Parliamentary candidate for a Yorkshire borough.
But the matter fell through because the Opposition, on their part, ran a
man whose chances were assured--an Anglo-Indian colonel who had passed
through every local distinction, from being a member of the local Board
of Guardians to becoming a DL. Against such odds Eastwell could not
fight. In the great game of politics it has ever been that the local
man who spends his money with the local butcher, baker and
candlestick-maker, is usually returned with a thumping majority.
The man from afar, the man with a mission, the man who knows his job and
will dare to raise his voice in the House to declaim his country's
shortcomings, will usually be jeered at as a "carpetbagger" and
hopelessly outpaced and outvoted.