CHAPTER XIX
Audrey, meanwhile, had been passing an uneasy time since the terrible scene at the showrooms.
When, later in the same day, she had made the important discovery that Mademoiselle Laure was really Mr. Candover’s sister, her first impulse was to challenge the woman, and to accuse her of being a party to the plot which had been laid for herself.
But that day’s experience had taught her wisdom, and she reflected in time that nothing was to be gained, while much might be risked, by a want of prudence and caution.
Had she not just found that out to her cost? For what was the result of her well-meant and bold attempt to open the eyes of the men who had been robbed of their money at “The Briars”? Mr. Candover had been artful enough to turn her accusation back upon herself, and all the men present had gone away, so she believed, thoroughly convinced that she was a particularly cunning adventuress, and that Mr. Candover was an honourable man whom she had insulted!
This latest discovery—for that Laure was the wicked sister of whom Mr. Candover’s ill-treated wife had spoken she had no doubt—had frightened Audrey more than all the rest. There was something more uncanny about the near neighbourhood of an unprincipled and unscrupulous woman than that of a man of the same class; and Audrey shivered at the thought that Laure was her enemy too.
What should she do? Should she consult a solicitor? If so, to whom should she go? Not, certainly, to the cold, steely-eyed man who had persisted in believing Gerard guilty. Audrey knew of no other, and had a vague idea that lawyers were for the most part wicked people, whose one object was to get fees; besides which, she had a much better grounded feeling that her own tale was too incoherent, and her own history too chequered, for her to have a good chance of getting believed without stronger proof than she could at present bring of the doings of the gang.
She thought, however, that Mrs. Webster might be able to give her the name of a solicitor to whom she could apply, and in the meantime she decided that her best course was to behave as much as possible as if nothing had happened of an unusual nature, and to sound Mademoiselle about the purchase of her interest in the business.
When, therefore, Marie Laure had done with her customers, and had dropped the conventional smile of the tradeswoman for the severe expression she wore when there was nothing to be sold, Audrey approached the subject in her mind by saying that she was tired of the business, and wished that she could sell it.
Marie Laure listened in stony silence, with a quick little arrowlike glance at the younger woman’s face which revealed a greater knowledge of the lady’s reasons than she professed to have.
And she answered very drily that she supposed Madame would consult Mr. Candover about that.
“Oh, I have no need to consult anybody,” replied Audrey quickly, speaking in French, the only language Mademoiselle Laure professed to know. “I have made up my mind.”
“You have not been long enough at the head of the business to make it your own,” answered Mademoiselle sharply. “What have you done as yet except drive away some of the customers other people have brought you?”
This, Audrey thought, argued a very close acquaintance with what had taken place that afternoon, and a better knowledge of the English language than Laure professed to possess.
“I’ve paid fifteen hundred pounds,” answered Audrey, “for the lease and furniture, and I am entitled to get something for those.”
Laure looked grim.
“When you have worked up the business,” she said drily, “which you will do better when you have sacrificed some of your British primness and coldness, you will have a right to talk of your interest in it. At present what you have given is as nothing to what others have supplied.”
“I don’t pretend that I’ve given everything,” answered Audrey gently but with firmness, “I only said that I have a right to expect to get something for my share. Would you be inclined to buy me out? You are a much cleverer saleswoman than I should ever make.”
“Not at all. You want experience, not cleverness. We should do wonders by-and-by if you would lay aside your primness. Beauty like yours is an asset of great value in business as in everything else. If I had your face I would become a millionaire,” added Marie Laure with conviction.
But flattery was wasted upon Audrey.
“You may become one as it is,” she answered earnestly, “and without me. I want to know what you would give me for my share?”
The dry-faced woman looked at her steadily.
“I must first be convinced,” she said drily, “that it is yours to sell.”
Audrey almost gasped.
“What do you mean?” she said breathlessly. “You know it is mine; you know I bought it, paid for it, and that I am the head—not a very active or clever head, but still the head.”
The cold eyes watched her intently as the reply came:—
“The business was bought and paid for by Madame Rocada. Now you say you are not Madame Rocada. You tell everybody so.”
“Everybody has known that from the beginning,” retorted Audrey. “It is true I signed the lease as Rocada—I’m sorry I did even that—but it was with no intention of deceiving any one. It was known that it was only a trade name, and it makes no difference.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” answered Laure. “I have an idea that it does make a difference, and that your having signed the lease in a name not your own may make it invalid.”
“You think then that Mr. Candover would have allowed me to sign a contract which was no contract?” asked Audrey drily.
This was well put, and Laure’s sallow face changed colour a little.
“Why don’t you consult him about it?” she said quickly. “You have let yourself be guided by him throughout the business; you took the place on his advice; you furnished it at the shop he chose. He has all the documents concerning the sale, I believe?”
“Yes,” admitted Audrey, recalling, with a heightened colour and a faster beating heart, that she had indeed, at the time of her great distress, left the whole affair in the hands of the man who had made such strong professions of friendship and kindness to her and her husband.
“Then why not ask him how you stand? Why not suggest the sale to him, and see what he says? It will be, I think, this: that the business was bought in the name of Rocada, and that it belongs to the trading firm of that name, and not to any individual person. Certainly not to the woman who persistently injures the business by declaring that she is not Madame Rocada!”
Audrey was puzzled. She remained a few minutes in deep thought, and it was Mademoiselle Laure who broke the silence.
“Think this over, take the night to consider it,” she said, with a coaxing change of tone. “It would be a most unwise thing to give up in a hurry a business which you are certainly the head of at present. What do you want? You are making money, and you will presently make more. Don’t be rash. Be advised, and remember that I am ready, in the future as in the past, to take the greater part of the hard work upon my own shoulders, and to leave the ornamental and easy and pleasant part to you!”
“But it’s not pleasant,” protested Audrey, “to be always at the beck and call of a class of people I don’t like!”
“Bah! All the people are lovable when their purses are long!” retorted Laure. “Think it over; sleep upon it; and we will have another talk about this in the morning.”
Audrey agreed to this, not that there was the least prospect of her changing her mind, but because she wanted time to consider the rather gruesome prospect opened by the woman’s words.
Was she really to lose all the money she had invested? Was it possible that, by cunning devices of which she was ignorant, Mr. Candover had induced her to sign mock-agreements, and that she had left herself no alternative but to remain at the head of the shady and repellant business which was, she felt sure, only a blind to the more nefarious one which had been carried on at “The Briars,” or to lose all her fifteen hundred pounds?
“Be here early in the morning,” were Mademoiselle Laure’s last words, “and I will tell you what conclusion I have arrived at, and you shall tell me if you agree with me.”
So on the following morning Audrey, who had gone back to her old rooms and found them vacant, came to the showrooms at an early hour, and found Mademoiselle Laure gracious and unusually conciliatory.
“I have considered the matter we talked about last night,” she said, as soon as they were alone together, “and I am sure that the business goes with the name. As long as you are Madame Rocada, therefore, the business is yours; but when you say you are no longer Rocada, then it is yours no longer.”
Perhaps Mademoiselle Laure exaggerated the simplicity of the woman with whom she was dealing. At any rate Audrey looked at her in open-eyed surprise.
“I don’t know much about these things,” she said bluntly. “But I think that’s very strange.”
“It’s true though. Ask Mr. Candover if it is not.”
Audrey hung her head thoughtfully, and then looked up.
“No,” she said at last, “I shall not ask him. I shall go straight to a solicitor, and see what he says.”
Mademoiselle Laure’s face changed and grew very repellent in its expression. She laughed harshly.
“What a little sceptic it is!” she said. “Look here, Madame. You will do as you please. You will see your solicitor, see a dozen solicitors. But first I will go myself to Mr. Candover, and see if he can help us out of this business. It may be he will say it is you who are right, and I who am wrong. At any rate, we will take his opinion first. And if you do not like it, you can then get another one.”
This seemed reasonable, particularly as Audrey saw, by the Frenchwoman’s excitement, that she was anxious and agitated. In all probability, Audrey thought, the two would think it wiser to come to a fair understanding with her, so that she could get out of the disagreeable business in which she found herself involved, at some loss indeed, but without the sacrifice of the whole of her fifteen hundred pounds.
Mademoiselle Laure was in earnest, for she started at once on her errand, after giving such recommendations to Audrey and the assistants as she thought might be useful; and the poor little head of the firm was left in sole command.
She would not, however, take any part in the day’s work, but shut herself into her little back-room on the approach of a customer, determined to have nothing more to do with the business until one of two things should happen: either she would erase the name Rocada from the windows and the firm’s stationery, and free the place from Laure; or she would retire altogether after receiving such compensation as she could get from that astute and unscrupulous pair, Mr. Candover and his half-sister.
But she tried in vain to escape the annoyances which her position entailed upon her.
Mademoiselle Laure was away a long time, and Audrey went out to luncheon and returned to find her still absent. It was late in the afternoon when she heard from her room, a voice she recognised asking for Madame Rocada.
And Audrey knew that the newcomer was Sir Barnaby Joyce.
She heard one of the saleswomen tell him that Madame was out, and the voice of the jovial baronet saying in reply that he would “wait till she was in then”.
Hurriedly deciding that she had better see him, and find out if she could what opinion was held about this miserable affair, and whether it was her version or Mr. Candover’s which was the most generally received, Audrey came out of her room, and following Sir Barnaby into the first of the showrooms, bowed to him with sedate dignity and stood waiting for him to speak, in a regal attitude which suited her tall figure, and the trained dress with its sparkling trimming of jet paillettes which set off so well her fair skin and golden hair.
The baronet turned quickly to meet her, bowed low in his turn, and greeted her with the most effusive courtesy. But Audrey was in no mood to meet his advances halfway, and she allowed him to stammer out a suggestion that he wished to make his wife a present “of—of—of—in point of fact of a—a—hat or bonnet or something of that sort,” without any attempt to help him out.
She bowed again, and turning in the same queenly manner to an obsequious assistant who was waiting near at hand, told her to bring “some hats and bonnets, the prettiest you have,” to show Sir Barnaby.
As the girl went swiftly away on her errand, the baronet, who saw that he was to be given no opportunities and that he must make them for himself, hastened to say, lowering his voice and gazing at the beautiful woman before him with what he considered a killing look:—
“I can’t tell you, Madame, how deeply grieved I was to be present the other day when that young fool Archdale made himself so objectionable——”
Audrey cut him short. Raising her eyebrows haughtily, she asked:—
“Did Sir Harry make himself more objectionable than anybody else? I was not aware of it, I assure you.”
Sir Barnaby was taken aback. He began to stammer and to twist the ends of his carefully dyed and waxed moustache.
“Did he? Oh, well—er—I’m very glad if you—you didn’t think so. It seemed to me that he—he said things which I should have resented, which in fact I did resent, and which—which—In short, I was disgusted at the whole thing. Considering how charmingly we have all been entertained at your house, Madame Rocada——”
“Oh, pray don’t call me that. It is not my name. My name is Angmering, Mrs. Angmering,” interrupted Audrey. “I am the wife of an unfortunate man who was wrongfully convicted of forgery, but whose people are already hard at work to get the conviction quashed.”
Her boldness, her frankness, the simplicity with which she spoke, surprised Sir Barnaby and extorted his admiration, even while it made his position difficult. For he wanted to take up a stand as her champion and defender, and her independence and resentment of the situation into which she had been forced made him uncertain how to address her.
“Indeed you have my best wishes that they may succeed,” said he. “A woman so young and beautiful needs a protector, and I shall rejoice to hear that your husband is at your side once more. In the meantime, should you ever need a friend, a disinterested friend, I hope you will remember that I am always at your service.”
“Thank you,” said Audrey coolly, as she took from the hands of the attendant maiden a sweet thing in white felt and ostrich feathers, with engaging bunches of violets tucked in here and there about the brim: “Would this suit Lady Joyce, do you think?”
“I—I—I’m afraid it’s a little—little young-looking,” murmured Sir Barnaby, by no means pleased to find himself thus ruthlessly recalled from chivalrous sentiment to matters of sordid business.
And the “young ladies” around, who all knew that Lady Joyce, though her husband’s contemporary, had allowed herself to age at a faster rate than he, exchanged stealthy looks, and wondered at Madame’s want of tact.
“I think something in velvet with a tuft of feathers at the side and something stringy about the neck is what Lady Joyce generally wears,” said Sir Barnaby at last, desperately, when picture-hats and dreams in ermine and ostrich feathers had been paraded before him in somewhat bewildering succession, and tried on the head of one of the pretty attendants with great gravity.
“Perhaps you had better bring Lady Joyce here to try on some bonnets and choose for herself,” suggested Audrey gently.
At which there was a further exchange of demure looks, unseen, among the assistants. Sir Barnaby answered rather stiffly:—
“Lady Joyce is content to follow my taste. I’ll take that one.”
And he pounced upon an ermine toque with an osprey at the side, and pulled out a five-pound note to pay for it.
“How much is it?” asked Audrey of the assistant who held the toque in her hand.
There was a smile on the face of the girl as she answered that it was four guineas. And Audrey felt that she had betrayed unseemly ignorance as she blushed and carefully counted out her customer’s change.
Sir Barnaby looked up plaintively into her face as she did so.
“I want to ask you,” he said in a low voice, when the attendants had retreated a little way, and were busy packing up the bargain, “whether you won’t have mercy upon your friends, and let us come and see you again sometimes. We had such a pleasant time at ‘The Briars’——”
“I hadn’t,” interrupted Audrey in a high-pitched voice. “I was induced to take the place under the impression that I could spend a quiet summer there. But I had nothing but annoyance and worry the whole time. I disapproved of what went on there, and I would never allow the same thing to happen again in any house I lived in.”
Sir Barnaby looked puzzled. Although he knew, as every one else did, that Audrey was only the figure-head of an organisation of which gambling was the object, he had not believed her to be so entirely a puppet in the hands of others as this speech and her passionate vindication of herself two days before would have seemed to suggest.
Even now he found a difficulty in believing that so much beauty was compatible with extreme innocence. Such a combination was contrary to his experience, which was large. He even felt nettled by these airs—as he considered them—of an irresponsibility which did not accord with the facts.
Audrey was moving towards the door, as an intimation to the baronet that his business was over. He had given the address to which his parcel was to be sent, and she had no wish to hear any more about the recent scene or about his disinterested devotion.
He lingered, however, when they had reached the outer doorway, and stood a moment holding up the portière, and turning to her with a sentimental expression on his rubicund, genial face.
“You are very severe, Madame. But indeed you are wrong if you think that the cards were the only or even the greatest attraction for us at ‘The Briars’. We will consider that settled, if you like, that there is to be no more gambling—if that displeases you. But surely you will not let your quarrel with Candover and Archdale interfere with your arrangements. You——”
“My quarrel with them!” repeated Audrey in surprise. “I have no quarrel with Sir Harry. I am displeased with Mr. Candover, certainly, for inducing me to accept a false position.”
“Candover! Was it Candover who——”
Audrey interrupted him. Speaking earnestly and distinctly she said:—
“Mr. Candover was my husband’s most intimate friend, and it was he who induced me to take this business, to use the name of Rocada, and who introduced me to the people who had the letting of ‘The Briars’. I have acted on his advice throughout, and I cannot but think the advice was very bad.”
Sir Barnaby looked interested, incredulous.
“Candover was a friend of your husband’s, you say?”
“Yes.”
There was a moment’s pause. Audrey wished to get rid of her visitor, but Sir Barnaby was anxious to say more. Neither noticed, as they stood in the doorway, that on the staircase, which was softly carpeted and illuminated only by one jet of electric light, a young man was standing, watching them.
Sir Barnaby suddenly seized her hand and pressed it to his lips.
“Never trust a husband’s friend,” said he. “Trust me. I’ll be yours.”
But Audrey scarcely even heard him. She had caught sight of the waiting figure beyond in the obscurity on the staircase, and her eyes were straining to pierce the gloom.
“Thank you,” she said mechanically, as she drew her hand away, and Sir Barnaby, having nothing more to say, was forced to go out.
She followed him to the three or four stairs which led to the little second landing. And standing on the top, she looked down while her face quivered with excitement, Sir Barnaby ran downstairs as fast as his somewhat gouty feet allowed, and she waited until she heard him go out by the side-door.
Then, leaning forward, supporting herself on the banisters, she uttered, very faintly, almost in a wailing tone, the one word:—
“Gerard.”
And when, shaking like a leaf, he came out of the angle of the wall where he had been standing, and ran up the stairs, she just held out her arms to him, and trying to whisper something incoherent, unintelligible, she fell, scarcely conscious, into his arms.