By degrees Lavender was comforted and reassured, and under Lucille's ministrations recovered much of her former health and cheerfulness. Attended by Lucille, she spent the next few days driving and idling in the little garden before her house, and reverted practically to her mode of life before she first asked Melville to call upon her at The Vale. The horror of the tragedy was even beginning to fade from her mind; she could never forget it, but she might hope to hear no more about it. She was almost beginning to think she never would, when one day, as her carriage was turning into Hyde Park she caught sight of the newspaper posters fastened against the railings, blazoning forth the sensational news of the arrest of Mr. Ashley.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN THE PARK.
Lavender was alone at the time, and the shock caused by the sight of the poster was so violent that her carriage had nearly completed the circuit of the Park before she fully recovered consciousness. She very naturally assumed that the Mr. Ashley referred to on the poster was Melville, and his arrest would almost inevitably involve her own. But as she was driving from the Marble Arch down towards Hyde Park Corner the desire to have some certain knowledge became quite irresistible, and stopping the coachman under the trees by the kiosk she got out of the carriage and walked across to the gate to buy some of the evening papers which had been the first to get the news. She was afraid to look at them until she got back into her carriage, in case she should find mention of her own name and betray her identity by some access of emotion; so folding them up she recrossed the Row and sank back amongst her pillows. She ordered the coachman to move away from the throng of carriages waiting to greet the Queen, and he walked his horse up to the bandstand, where no people gather so early in the day. And there, with tumultuously beating heart and nervously shaking hands, Lavender opened one paper after another and devoured all the news about the Fairbridge mystery.
Her first feeling was, perhaps not unnaturally, one of relief when she discovered that it was Ralph and not Melville who had been arrested. If the police were capable of trailing off on such a particularly wrong scent, they were capable of anything except detecting the real culprit. There was, too, something especially grotesque in their suspecting Ralph, who, according to Melville, was a paragon of all the virtues, instead of Melville, who, according to the same authority, was not. But to her first sensation of relief there succeeded another sequence of thoughts that filled her with a different emotion. The report of the proceedings before the magistrates was all too brief for anyone so vitally interested in the matter as Lavender was, but, womanlike, she read between the lines and jumped to conclusions with feminine accuracy.
Ralph had evidently gained the boathouse at almost the same moment that she and Melville left it; he had lingered with luxurious leisureliness over his toilet, and the police were bent upon proving that he had had time and opportunity to commit the murder. They would find a motive for the crime in the fact that under this recent will he inherited practically everything, and even if they could not bring sufficient evidence to hang him, they would, by inference and by circumstantial evidence, weave such a net around his feet that he could scarcely look to go free again. It meant, in short, that an innocent man would be condemned, and there was only one thing could save him—for Lavender herself to come forward and tell the truth, so bringing about Melville's death and her own ruin.
That, in a nutshell, was the actual state of affairs. Ralph's life was in her hands, but if she saved it she could be under no misapprehension as to what the cost would be. Whatever she did now, one of those two brothers—her own husband's nephews—would have to die at the hands of the common hangman.
Lavender read again the personal paragraphs about the suspected man, to which the halfpenny papers always give so much prominence. She tried to picture him as he must be in the flesh, with that crisp, curling hair, that straightforward expression which seemed to be his chief characteristic, and that lithe and muscular frame. There was the girl, too, to be considered, this Miss Austen, to whom Ralph was engaged; her happiness, like her lover's life, was in Lavender's hands to save or to destroy. Which pair was to be ruined—Melville and Lavender, or Ralph and this other girl?
For the man suspected of a foul crime, of which he was entirely innocent, Lavender felt nothing but pity, but the thought of the hapless girl who loved him did not touch her so nearly; if anything, it rather hardened her heart, although there was nothing cruel in her nature. The conflict of interests was so deadly, its issue fraught with such tremendous consequences, that she could not be wholly blamed for her indecision as she sat in her carriage under the trees and tried to weigh the facts in a true balance. Her immediate surroundings increased the difficulty of realising the actual value of the facts until the difficulty became an impossibility.
Yet absolute inaction was no less impossible. She had promised Melville neither to write nor call, but she must ascertain what he was doing in view of this new complication. She knew he had attended the inquest, and could imagine something of his relief at the verdict, but she did not know him well enough to forecast his behaviour in face of this extraordinary perversity of fate. Hitherto she had regarded him as a well-bred, entertaining man about town, well endowed with means, cultivated, and generally charming, one of many sparkling bubbles in the great bumper of the world's wine. The fragments of conversation she had overheard at the boathouse proved conclusively that her opinion of him was ill-founded; he was an unscrupulous adventurer, capable of lying, meanness, blackmail—of any treachery, if that was the easiest way of getting money to squander on himself. Beneath his mask of resourceful self-possession, too, there lurked a reserve of passion that, as she had seen with her own eyes, could on occasion burst out with volcanic fury and kill whatever obstacle barred the way to the goal of its desires. The actual murder might have been unpremeditated, done in a moment of maniacal anger, but now that that moment was past and his normal ingenuity and resourcefulness were able to have free play again, how would Melville deal with the problem of saving his brother without incriminating himself? She must find out.