“Oh, no. That matter is quite clear, the evidence complete. I mean—oh, I will tell you afterwards what I mean. It may help you to bear your trouble, thankfully.”
She approached him again. “Won’t you tell me now?” she begged him.
“No,” he answered, rising, and speaking with finality. “Afterwards if necessary, afterwards. And now get back to bed, child, and forget the fellow. I swear to you that he isn’t worth a thought. Later I shall hope to prove it to you.”
“That you never will,” she told him fiercely.
He laughed, and again his laugh was harsh and terrible in its bitter mockery. “Yet another trusting fool,” he cried. “The world is full of them—it is made up of them, with just a sprinkling of knaves to batten on their folly. Go to bed, Sylvia, and pray for understanding of men. It is a possession beyond riches.”
“I think you are more in need of it than I am,” she told him, standing by the door.
“Of course you do. You trust, which is why you are a fool. Trust,” he said, speaking the very language of Polichinelle, “is the livery of fools.”
She went without answering him and toiled upstairs with dragging feet. She paused a moment in the corridor above, outside Una’s door. She was in such need of communion with some one that for a moment she thought of going in. But she knew beforehand the greeting that would await her; the empty platitudes, the obvious small change of verbiage which her ladyship would dole out. The very thought of it restrained her, and so she passed on to her own room and a sleepless night in which to piece together the puzzle which the situation offered her, the amazing enigma of Sir Terence’s seeming access of insanity.
And the only conclusion that she reached was that intertwined with the death of Samoval there was some other circumstance which had aroused in the adjutant an unreasoning hatred of his friend, converting him into Tremayne’s bitterest enemy, intent—as he had confessed—upon seeing him shot for that night’s work. And because she knew them both for men of honour above all, the enigma was immeasurably deepened.
Had she but obeyed the transient impulse to seek Lady O’Moy she might have discovered all the truth at once. For she would have come upon her ladyship in a frame of mind almost as distraught as her own; and she might—had she penetrated to the dressing-room where her ladyship was—have come upon Richard Butler at the same time.