People of Position

by Stanley Portal Hyatt

His sister laughed in bitter scorn. "And to half a dozen other men as well. Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, what a fool you are, how you've been fooled. Do you think she's been true to you? Do you think a vile creature like that could be true to anyone? No, I will speak for all your swearing at me. Do you think that whilst you have been slaving at that office at nights she has been at home thinking of you? Oh, you have been a blind fool! She has told you lies about everything, over the rent, over the amount she had to pay to the hire-purchase people, over what she was spending. Do you think your paltry two pounds a week was sufficient to dress her and keep her in luxury?"

Jimmy turned away, gripping the mantelpiece for support. He remembered many little things which had given him a momentary pang of suspicion at the time; now, suddenly those suspicions became certainties; and when he looked round again his face was five years older, for he had loved Lalage, and he knew that May was telling him the truth. He had been a blind fool; but still the remembrance of the past was strong in him, and he made a last fight against believing.

"It's a lie, it's a lie," he repeated hoarsely. There was something in his eyes which nearly broke down May's hardness, a look she had never seen on any man's face before, which she never got out of her memory again.

"I know it hurts, Jimmy, dear," she said far more gently. "It must hurt because you've been infatuated by a very clever and bad woman; but for all that it is true. Do you know anything of her past? What has she told you? We know now that she was the daughter of a scientific writer, and that, even when he lay on his dying bed, she went away with someone, then came back with a lie in her mouth, about having been to town, selling one of his unpublished books. Her own aunt told us of it, her aunt by marriage."

"I don't believe it. I won't believe it," Jimmy muttered.

May shrugged her shoulders. "We have proofs, the best of proofs. Is it not so, Walter?"

The elder brother nodded without looking up. In his case, too, it was the first time tragedy, real tragedy, had come into his life, and it was making him think. He realised dimly that the light had gone out for Jimmy, and as he scratched lines on his blotting-pad with the rim of his eyeglasses, he fell to wondering, in a dull, far-off sort of way, whether his brother would shoot himself as their father had done, and what the coroner's verdict would be, and what the world, by which he meant the City, would say. Then the spring of his glasses snapped suddenly, and the annoyance brought him back sharply to the immediate present.

"Yes, we have complete proof, legal proof," he said. "Your sister is quite right." Words seemed to be failing him, then he got up abruptly and laid a kindly hand on Jimmy's shoulder, as he had often done many years before when they had both been boys. "It's better for you to know, old man. She's a bad lot, and you're well clear of it all. You'll soon forget her and find someone very different."

His words had the effect of rousing May's anger anew. "Don't talk like that, Walter, please," she said sharply. "It's hardly decent under the present circumstances. I presume, Jimmy, that after what we have told you, you will neither see nor write to that creature again."

Jimmy's eyes flashed. "I shall see her and ask her side of it. Am I to condemn her unheard on the strength of the gossip some vile hangers-on have concocted in return for your money? I shall go down there at once."