Christine said nothing for a few minutes.
“It must be very nice to be able to give away so much,” she said musingly, “but for that, I don't see that wealth has much to offer. Which is as well”—she turned to Mrs. Erskine with a smile—“as I am never likely to have much of it.”
Judging by Mrs. Erskine's face, she did not share Christine's philosophical point of view in the least.
“A gipsy woman read my hand when I was a tiny tot and said that I should die a wealthy woman, and years later I had the same thing told me—that I should die possessed of great wealth.”
They drove home in silence. Christine turned over in her mind what she had just learnt as to her hostess's division of her money. At first she was a little sceptical as to its literal truth, but after a week in the villa she took this suspicion back. Mrs. Erskine did live apparently on the scale of one thousand a year. Apart from the villa and its furnishings, which she had evidently purchased years ago, and the motor-car and meals which all the household shared, she spent but little on herself.
Of anything that could help John Carter Christine learnt nothing. Mrs. Erskine, though she had never heard of him before his arrest, now proclaimed his guilt as firmly as though he had already been tried and convicted. There was only one startling fact, after close on a fortnight, which the villa had revealed to Christine, and that was that Mrs. Erskine was afraid of something. She herself openly alluded to the fact, when discussing a case in the paper, that she slept with a loaded revolver under her pillow.
“Day or night I always have one close at hand, and I'm quite a fair shot.”
“In the midst of life we are in death,” cackled the Major, who had not shown himself for several days.
Mrs. Erskine looked at him with one of her frosty smiles, but said nothing. It suddenly struck Christine that here might be the reason why Mrs. Erskine kept the Clarks and the Major with her. They were even in the habit, she learnt, of sharing the summer cottage together, yet Christine did not think that Mrs. Erskine cared any more for them in her heart than she did for herself—Christine—whom yet she had asked to extend her visit for at least another fortnight.
Were they all not so much friends as a bodyguard? If so, from what danger were they intended to shield their hostess? She puzzled over the matter greatly. It seemed to her the one point of interest she had unearthed. As for Pointer, he wrote no comment, only that she was to watch every detail closely that came under her notice. True, she remembered Robert saying that his mother was timid, a timidity which he himself had inherited, just as he had her one uneven eyebrow, and also a little mannerism of the wrists which Christine never saw without remembering him with a pang.