“Rather the influence of unscrupulousness on mere animal courage. Gastineau’s mind and methods were deeper than Charlie could fathom. There is always a terror in the unknown.”
“Countess Alexia does not seem to have been particularly happy in her lovers,” Bellairs remarked.
“No,” Greetland replied. “She is rather a mystery in that way. I mean, that she was not married long ago. Perhaps her unfortunate experiences may account for it. But unhappily, a woman like that is bound to attract the wrong sort of men as well as the right. Anyhow, she has been clever enough to hold them at bay. She could hardly have foreseen the Martindale development.”
“Can any one, who knows anything of her, really believe she killed him?” Lufton asked incredulously.
Greetland did not care to scotch a profitable scandal. “Women are unaccountable creatures,” he replied, with a shrug.
CHAPTER VIII
THE VAUX HOUSE CASE
THE Rullington case had come on, had dragged its ugly length through twenty sensational columns of print, and had ended with honours—or, rather, dishonours—easy. Incidentally, it sent Geoffrey Herriard several rungs up the ladder of success. His position now was enviable and seemed assured, thanks to the strong, acute brain which backed him. It was, perhaps, a cynical pleasure to Gastineau, lying helpless, to feel that, nevertheless, he was not entirely impotent, to strike vicious blows from behind his living mask; to make his personality still felt in a world to which it was dead. The lust for fighting still burned fiercely within him; he could indulge it, and grimly watch the effect of his tactics, his cunning lunges, his deft parries. Perhaps, too, there was a certain joy in holding a man’s career and reputation in the hollow of his hand. Herriard was an apt pupil; still, he was, after all, but a pupil. The clear grasp of the case or of a situation, the piercing, unerring insight into the legal and political complications, above all, the gift of forecasting probable developments, all these were not to be acquired: they could only be communicated from master to pupil as occasion arose. Herriard, with Gastineau’s guidance withdrawn, would have been left a man of fluency, of reputation, but with no administrative power behind them; one who would probably fail at a crisis, who at the parting of the ways would be as likely to take the wrong road as the right. Each man knew this, and each wondered at times whether the other knew it. Certainly Herriard never showed the slightest suggestion that he could get on without his mentor. On the contrary, now that his reputation at the Bar seemed established, he was just as assiduous as ever in paying his evening visits to the secluded house in Mayfair for instruction in the next day’s procedure. And Gastineau, on his part, never seemed to weary of taking his friend at great pains through the minutest convolutions and ramifications of his work. It was like an old chess-player instructing a prentice hand in the analysis of openings, moves, and counter-moves, of attack and defence.
But one day a strange thing happened. At the rising of the Courts a knotty legal point which had been sprung upon Herriard by the opening counsel remained undecided. Herriard was going to speak in the House that night, and so, being rather nonplussed by the point of law, and not knowing when he might get away from the division, he jumped into a hansom and drove off to Mayfair with the intention of putting the point to Gastineau while the arguments were still fresh in his mind, and so being put up to a telling reply.
To his surprise, and for the first time during their acquaintance, Gastineau was denied to him. The bolt of the latch was shot, and his key would not turn it. He rang, and Gastineau’s man, Hencher, who opened the door, said, with a manner of significant insistence, that his master could not see Mr. Herriard that afternoon.
Herriard stared. Such a reception was the last thing he would have looked for.