“Did other people think him guilty—the people he had known in Nice, for instance?”
“I fancy there were very few who thought much about him,” answered the doctor. “Luckily for him and his belongings—whoever they might be—he had dropped out of society for some time before the catastrophe, and he had never been a person of importance in Nice. He had not occupied a villa, or given parties. He lived with his wife at an hotel, and the man who lives at an hotel counts for very little on the Riviera. He is only a casual visitor, who may come and go as he pleases. His movements—unless he has rank or fashion or inordinate wealth to recommend him—excite no interest. He is not a personage. Hence there was very little talk about the lamentable end of Mr. Ransome’s married life. There were hardly half-a-dozen paragraphs in our local papers, all told; and I doubt if those were quoted in the Figaro or Galignani. My patient might congratulate himself upon his obscurity.”
“Did no one from England visit him during his confinement here?”
“No one. The local authorities looked after his interests so far as to take care of the ready money which was found in his house, and which sufficed to pay for the poor lady’s funeral and for my patient’s expenses, leaving a balance to be handed over to him on his recovery. From the hour he left these gates I never heard from him or of him again; but every new year has brought me an anonymous gift from London, such a gift as only a person of refined taste would choose, and I have attributed those annual greetings to Mr. George Ransome.”
“It would be only like him to remember past kindness.”
“You know him well, madame?”
“Very well; so well as to be able to answer with my life for his being incapable of the crime of which even you, who saw so much of him, hesitate to acquit him.”
“It is my misfortune, madame, to have seen the darker sides of the human mind, and to know that in the whitest life there may be one black spot—one moment of sin which stultifies a lifetime of virtue. However, it is possible that your judgment is right in this particular case. Be assured I should be glad to think so, and glad to know that Mr. Ransome’s after days have been all sunshine.”
A sigh was Mildred’s only answer. Monsieur Leroy saw tears in her eyes, and asked no more. He was shrewd enough to guess her connection with his former patient—a second wife, no doubt. No one but a wife would be so intensely interested.
“If there is anything I can do for you, or for my old patient—” he began, seeing that his visitor lingered.