"Is it discreet to tell me this?" he asked, countering her reproof of a moment earlier.
She smiled rather wickedly. "Are you not a lawyer and a Gatepath? And can one not tell anything to a lawyer and a Gatepath? Besides, I have sent in my resignation, and am now a free woman. It has been a good time, a very good time. I have fought devils and mastered devils in England and France and Italy for four long years, and now I would rest. You say that time and sorrow have spared me. Yet I have known both time and sorrow. Have I not lost...."
He broke into a babble of apologies. "I did not know.... I did not realise...."
She waved a hand, and he fell silent. "I do not wear the trappings of woe, for though I am eternally widowed, I glory in my loss. It was in the rearguard at Caporetto, when all less gallant souls had fled, that my Guilberti fell."
Of course from that moment Gatepath was her slave. She had flattered him and humbugged him as she flattered and humbugged all of us. Madame had no designs against Gatepath, yet she could not forbear to triumph over him. "One never knows," she said, "when one may need a devoted friend, and need him badly. I always look forward."
Two or three weeks later Madame found a letter at her club signed "Gatepaths." It was the club in Dover Street with those steep steps down which the members tumble helplessly in frosty weather. Madame calls it "The Club of Falling Women."
It appears that Gatepath, hunting for an adviser of ripe wisdom, had sought out the Chief of Dawson and lately of Madame, and laid bare his pressing troubles. The Chief is one of those rare men to whom all his friends, and they are as the stars in number, go seeking counsel in their crimes and follies. Nothing shocks him, nothing surprises him. And from the depths of his wise, humorous, sympathetic mind, he will almost always draw waters of comfort. Suppose, for example, one had slain a man and urgently sought to dispose of the corpse—a not uncommon problem in crowded cities—to whom could one more profitably turn than to the Chief of His Majesty's Detective Service? Or if, in a passing fit of absence of mind, one had wedded three wives, and the junior in rank began to suspect the existence of one or more seniors; do we not all suffer from lapses of memory? One does not put these problems before the Chief as one's own—there is a decent convention in these matters—but, of course, he knows. To know all is to pardon all, and there is very little that the Chief does not know about you or me.
The family solicitor of peers and princes poured into the Chief's ear the fantastic cause of his present distresses. He delivered himself of the story in all seriousness, for it was dreadfully serious to him. Never in all his experience, and in that of his century-old firm, had anything so dreadfully serious occurred. The Chief controlled himself until the end was reached, and then exploded in a yell of laughter.
"It is nothing to laugh at," grumbled Gatepath.
"Not for you, perhaps. But to my mind the situation is gorgeous. Has this man the legal right of succession?"