“Eugène!” repeated Audrey, with faltering lips.
The strange woman looked at her intently.
“Ah! You don’t know him by that name perhaps!”
Audrey, trembling, returned the woman’s keen look with one as
penetrating.
“What makes you think he is here?” she asked sharply.
The visitor, thus recalled to the object of her visit, hesitated for
the first time.
“Since you know the girls,” she said, “I presume you know their father
too.”
“Yes.”
“And as I find you are a very beautiful woman, my suspicion is
confirmed. You are one of his victims, or his tools, as all the pretty
women whom he meets become.”
Audrey, with fears which she could not express tightening round her
heart, signed to the weird woman to sit down. Drawing a chair close to
that which her visitor took, she sat down by her, and lowering her
voice, said:--
“Tell me everything, everything. I am in a maze; I am in a position in
which I can’t move hand or foot without coming to some corner from
which I can’t escape. If you can tell me anything to help me, I shall
be grateful, more grateful than I can express. Now who is the man you
mean? What is his other name? If you are his wife and those girls are
your children and his, you can trust me. I am a wife myself----”
“Whose?” said the woman shortly.
“My husband’s name is Gerard Angmering, and he is the nephew of Lord
Clanfield,” she answered simply.
“Why isn’t he here with you? Why are you alone? Where is he?”
She poured out the questions one after the other, so quickly that it
was impossible to answer any of them until she stopped speaking.
Audrey bit her lip.
“Never mind that,” she said. “Let it be enough for you that he is all
the world to me, and that, if you find me here alone, it is neither by
his wish nor by mine.”
The strange woman was peering into her face with a penetration which
was uncanny. When she had finished her inspection and Audrey,
irritated and perplexed, paused, the visitor laughed harshly.
“I see, I see. You _are_ one of the victims! Now tell me, what are you
doing here? What goes on here? Is it gambling, or----”
With the blood rushing to her cheeks Audrey rose up with a cry.
“Oh, how did you know?” she cried breathlessly.
The visitor said nothing for a moment, but stared at her in the same
piercing way. Then she got up, went softly across the room to the
door, opened it quickly, and looked out.
“What are you doing?” said Audrey.
“Eugène uses spies,” replied the visitor briefly, as she walked
slowly round the room, apparently examining the furniture, the very
walls, to see whether there was any possibility of their being
overheard by unseen ears. Having satisfied herself, she came back to
her seat. “And so,” she said bluntly, “this is a gambling-house, and
you are the decoy?”
“How dare you call me that?” panted Audrey, more angry than she could
express.
But the woman went steadily on: “You, with your pretty face and
figure, your well-bred air and your handsome dresses, are the nominal
head of this house, I suppose?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, don’t be offended. Why should you be, when what I say is true?
Listen. I was his wife, you know. He was a rich man when I married
him, and I brought him money myself. All went well while the money
lasted, and we could live well and ostentatiously, keep horses and
carriages--there were no motor-cars in those days--and a yacht and
every luxury. Then the money ran short--the times changed,
difficulties grew. Things grew worse and worse and presently they
began to mend again, mend mysteriously. It was some time before I knew
that there was anything wrong about the new prosperity, but when the
knowledge did come, when I understood that I was expected to share in
the vile work--to help in ugly schemes--cheating at
cards--forgery--fraud--he was clever at them all--I stood firm, I
refused.”
She paused, and the remembrance of the far-away time she referred to
seemed to increase the intense melancholy of her worn face, to render
her deep voice more hollow. When she went on speaking, there came
again over her face that wild look which had made the servants at Miss
Willett’s, and Audrey herself, take her for a madwoman.
“When he found he could do nothing with me, he changed his plans.
Since I would not help him, I must go. By every cruel device, every
wicked stratagem he tried to drive me out of my mind; he sent my two
children away from me, he worked upon my nerves until I became
hysterical, used threats which nobody would believe, threats of
abandoning my little children, of murdering me.”
“Why didn’t you tell some one?” said Audrey.
“Because nobody would have believed me. He was gentle, handsome, with
a caressing voice and charming manner. I was hysterical, irritable,
proud, perhaps overbearing and too unhappy to be liked. Everybody took
his part, and said how hard it was for genial, charming Eugène
Reynolds to be tied to such an unamiable wife.”
“Why didn’t you run away from him?”
“I tried, but he was too clever for me. He knew that I would have
moved heaven and earth to find my children, that I would have exposed,
denounced him, once safely away from his diabolical influence, once
free to breathe and to act for myself. For, though I hated him, I
feared him too, and dared scarcely move without his permission. I
don’t know how I managed to keep firm in refusing to help him. I think
now it was his fear that I should break down and blunder that saved
me. For I used to feel that, if he had gone on insisting, I should
have yielded at last. As it was, I was of no use to him, so he hated
me, and again and again I thought he would kill me. And I told his
friends so, and that was my undoing. He, with his sweet voice and
caressing ways, to attempt to kill me, a tall, strong, powerful woman!
The thing was absurd. And then the way was smooth for what he did. He
got two doctors to certify that I was insane--one of them believed it,
I’m sure, and the other was the sort of flabby man who can be led to
believe anything--and I was shut up in a lunatic asylum.”
There was a pause, and then she said in a hollow whisper:--
“I’ve been there fourteen years!”
“What!” cried Audrey, aghast, incredulous, horror-struck.
“Fourteen years,” repeated the woman, “ever since my elder child,
Pamela, was four years old. I knew they were told--both of them--that
I was dead, and that was all I was allowed to know. Can you wonder
that there was no difficulty in believing me insane? But I never was
insane, no, not for an hour. Always, always I had the idea in my mind
that I must get out, I must find them, I must save them from such a
father. But the years went by, and I could never get away. It was in
the west country, close to the Welsh border, that I was shut up, and I
was out of the world, out of touch with everything. I never got a
chance of escape till six months ago, when they thought I had worn out
my old longings to be free, and then I came straight to London, and
hunted, and hunted, till I found out where Eugène had hidden himself,
and the new name by which he was known.”
“And what is that?” asked Audrey.
“Reginald Candover,” replied the woman quickly.
Although she had been prepared for this, Audrey could not hear it
without a fresh shudder.
“How can I believe all this?” she asked suddenly, turning pale as
certain possibilities connected with this terrible discovery occurred
to her. “I can’t, I won’t believe it!”
The visitor shrugged her shoulders.
“Why should you believe it? It is no affair of mine whether you do or
not,” she said simply. “All I came here for was to learn something of
my children. Pamela sent me your name and address as a friend of
theirs, and all I ask of you is to tell me all you can about them.
What are they going to do? They are nearly grown up, and want a
mother’s care. Who is going to give it them?”
Audrey listened with blanching cheeks. This insistence on the one
point, the girls, always the two girls, was to her mind more
convincing than anything else of the truth of the woman’s story.
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Audrey. “They are getting
impatient at being left at school, and are always importuning to be
taken away. Pamela wants to come to me. But I don’t want her here, and
to do him justice, their father seems just as unwilling to bring them
away from school as they are anxious to come.”
A look of relief came over the poor woman’s face.
“You really believe that?” she said eagerly.
“I do indeed. I’ve had proof of it. Remember, even bad men are
generally good to their own children!”
The stranger sighed.
“Some are, I know. But if you have received as much ill treatment from
a man as I have from my husband, you find it difficult to believe any
good of him. Besides----” A new thought seemed to fill her with new
horror, and again she looked cautiously round, and lowered her voice
still further. “There’s his sister. Even if he were to wish to keep
his daughters from harm, his sister is such a wicked woman that, if he
were to put them into her care, they would be worse off than ever.”
“His sister! Has he a sister?”
“A half-sister. A woman without heart or conscience, and with no
passion but for money, and no affection for any one but her
half-brother. She hated me because I was English, and so were all my
ways and all my tastes.”
“Wasn’t she English then?”
“No, nor he either. They are both of mixed nationality, and speak
three or four languages equally well. And each is as clever and as
wicked as the other. Do you mean to say you have never met her?”
And again both her look and tone grew incredulous.
“Never to my knowledge,” said Audrey. “Perhaps she is dead.”
The stranger heaved a sigh which Audrey could not but think was one of
hope. She gazed long and earnestly at the younger woman.
“I’m sorry I said what I did--about your being too beautiful to be
good,” she said suddenly. “I think you are good; I think I could trust
you! Will you keep an eye on my girls?”
Audrey’s face puckered with distress.
“There’s nothing I would do more willingly,” said she, “but how am I
to do it? He is their father; I can’t interfere with his wishes; it
would even do more harm than good for me to tell them the truth about
you. The advice I strongly give you is to refrain from trying to see
them, since their knowing the whole truth, or even a part of it, could
only lead to dissensions, and might perhaps change their father’s
feelings towards them, which seem at present to be right and natural
ones, to anger and bitterness.”
The poor woman’s face grew dark with distress.
“I know quite well you’re right,” said she. “But it’s so hard, so very
hard.” She paused and appeared to reflect deeply for some moments.
Then she went on abruptly: “If I do as you suggest, if I go back,
away, without trying to see them again, will you write to me and let
me know what they are doing, and how they are?”
Her tone was so humble, so imploring, that, absorbed as she was in her
own anxieties, suggested by her visitor’s revelations, Audrey felt the
tears rising to her eyes.
“I will do what I can,” she said earnestly. “But it is so little! For
now that I know so much, I shall at once break off acquaintance with
him.”
The other laughed mockingly.
“You may think you will, but you will not,” she said, with confidence.
“Once in his net, no one gets away so easily. You will try and you
will think you have succeeded; but you will feel the meshes about your
feet, and you will be brought back, brought safely back into the
net--every time!”
The words filled Audrey with unspeakable horror. For even while she
would have contradicted, have protested, have scouted the idea
presented to her, there rose up in her mind the terrible fear that it
was a true one! Had she not tried already more than once to escape
from the net, and had she not always been brought back, surely yet so
gently that she was hardly aware of the compelling force at all?
She burst out into violence, clenching her teeth.
“I will escape,” she said. “I will not continue my acquaintance with a
man whom I know to be wicked!”
The stranger laughed again.
“You have only my word for it, you know, the word of a woman who has
been declared mad! Better forget what I have said, or disregard it,
and go on as if nothing had happened to open your eyes even the least
bit. You can do no good by protesting, and may do yourself harm. You
little guess how strong the forces are which you would have to fight
against.”
But there she was wrong. Gradually Audrey’s instincts had been telling
her what her visitor now openly confirmed, and the knowledge of the
strength of the organisation she would have to contend against was
growing every moment more profound.
“Where shall you go,” she asked abruptly, “when you leave here? You
want me to write to you. Where shall I write to? And how shall I
address you?”
The visitor replied after a moment’s hesitation; perhaps some
lingering doubts of Audrey still had to be overcome or some suspicion
as to whether Eugène’s influence might not be strong enough to
extract from this beautiful, gentle-mannered woman the information he
might want about his hated wife.
At last, however, she made up her mind suddenly, and answered:--
“I am living in Hertfordshire with a maiden sister, and openly under
the name in which Eugène married me--Mrs. Reynolds. I’ve lived there
nearly six months now, ever since I got away from the asylum. Probably
the asylum people haven’t told him of my escape, and are still taking
the money for my maintenance. At any rate I’ve been so cautious in my
inquiries to find out him and my daughters, that I don’t think he
knows where I am. Now he will find out of course. I’ve no doubt there
are spies in this house who will inform him of my visit. But,” she
added with confidence, “as I’ve been living in freedom for so long, it
would take some formalities to get me back again, and--well, I can
afford to risk it. I’ve learnt something about my girls, and I have, I
hope, found that they’ve got a friend.”
Quite suddenly she turned upon Audrey such an imploring, piteous look
that the younger woman was deeply moved.
“I have need of friends myself,” said she, in a broken voice, “and I
have no power, no influence with anybody. But if I could do anything
for them, believe me I would, oh, I would!”
The stranger rose, held out her long, slim hand, and grasped that of
Audrey.
“I thank you, and I trust you,” she said simply under her breath. Then
she turned to the door, but paused to say: “No. I won’t go out like
that. Better not. These people will let him know who has been here.
For both our sakes we must play them a trick. Ring the bell, and let
them find you cowering in a corner of the room, as if you were
frightened. Tell the servants I’m a madwoman who has been raving
incoherently, and that you can’t make out who I am.”
“But,” said Audrey, “might that not help him to get you back to the
asylum again?”
The visitor laughed shrewdly.
“He won’t trouble about putting me in if he thinks I really am mad,”
she replied quietly.
There was strong sense in this view, and Audrey carried out her
suggestion to the letter, rang the bell, then withdrew into a corner
of the room, behind an armchair, while the visitor stood, gaunt and
forbidding, in the middle of the floor.
When Barnard appeared in answer to her summons, Audrey told him, with
an appearance of alarm, to show the lady out, and made gestures to him
to intimate that she was mad. The gaunt visitor went with a wild
laugh, muttering to herself, and carried out her part of the stratagem
so well that Barnard himself closed the door very quickly behind her,
under the impression that he was indeed shutting out a dangerous
lunatic.
Then Audrey, suffering from the reaction after the intense excitement
caused by the interview with her visitor, went shuddering and
shivering up the stairs, locked herself into her room, and at once
began to pack up for immediate departure.
Whether she were brought back into the net or not, she would at any
rate make a valiant attempt to get clear of it!