“Well, that seems all right, doesn’t it?” I asked coolly.
“All right?” spluttered Jim, who was more upset than I’d ever seen him. “You seem to regard being run in for murder as an everyday occurrence!”
“Well, it’s preferable to being in prison in Russia! If Freeman hadn’t taken it into his thick head to fix on me, I should have been dead and gone to glory by this time. Look here, Jim, there’s nothing to worry about, really. I asked Freeman to wire or ’phone to you yesterday when we arrived, thinking, of course, you’d be at Chelsea; then Southbourne turned up, and was awfully good. He’s arranged for my defence, so there’s nothing more to be done at present. The case will come before the magistrate to-morrow; so far as I’m concerned I’d rather it had come on to-day. I don’t suppose for an instant they’d send me for trial. The police can’t have anything but the flimsiest circumstantial evidence against me. I guess I needn’t assure you that I didn’t murder the man!”
He looked at me queerly through his glasses; and I experienced a faint, but distinctly uncomfortable, thrill. Could it be possible that he, who knew me so well, could imagine for a moment that I was guilty?
“No, I don’t believe you did it, my boy,” he said slowly. “But I do believe you know a lot more about it than you owned up to at the time. Have you forgotten that Sunday night—the last time I saw you? Because if you have, I haven’t! I taxed you then with knowing—or suspecting—that Anne Pendennis was mixed up with the affair in some way or other. It was your own manner that roused my suspicions then, as well as her flight; for it was flight, as we both know now. If I had done my duty I should have set the police on her; but I didn’t, chiefly for Mary’s sake,—she’s fretting herself to fiddle-strings about the jade already, and it would half kill her if she knew what the girl really was.”
“Stop,” I said, very quietly. “If you were any other man, I would call you a liar, Jim Cayley. But you’re Mary’s husband and my old friend, so I’ll only say you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do,” he persisted. “It is you who don’t or pretend you don’t. I’ve learned something even since you’ve been away. I told you I believed both she and her father were mixed up with political intrigues; I spoke then on mere suspicion. But I was right. She belongs to the same secret society that Cassavetti was connected with; there was an understanding between them that night, though it’s quite possible they hadn’t met each other before. Do you remember she gave him a red geranium? That’s their precious symbol.”
“Did you say all this to Southbourne when he showed you the portrait that was found on Carson?” I interrupted.
“What, you know about the portrait, too?”