Still a fierce, mad jealousy was gnawing at my heart. Mabel, the calm, sweet girl I loved so well, and whose future had been entrusted to me, had, like so many other girls, committed the grievous error of falling in love with a common man, rough, uncouth, and far beneath her station. Love in a cottage—about which we hear so much—is all very well in theory, just as is the empty-pocket-light-heart fallacy, but in these modern days the woman habituated to luxury can never be happy in the four-roomed house any more than the man who gallantly marries for love and foregoes his inheritance.
No. Each time I recollected that young ruffian’s sneers and threats, his arrogance and his final outburst of murderous passion, which had been so near producing a fatal termination to my well-beloved, my blood boiled. My anger was aflame. The fellow had escaped, but within myself I determined that he should not go scot-free.
And yet, when I recollected, it seemed as though Mabel were utterly and irresistibly in that man’s power, even though she had attempted defiance.
We remained with Hales and his wife for another hour learning few additional facts except from a word that the old lady let drop. I ascertained that they actually had a son whose name was Herbert, but whose character was none too good.
“He was in the stables at Belvoir,” his mother explained when I made inquiry of him. “But he left nearly two years ago, and we haven’t seen him since. He writes sometimes from various places and appears to be prospering.”
The fellow was, therefore, as I had surmised from his appearance, a horsekeeper, a groom, or something of that kind.
It was already half-past seven when we arrived back at King’s Cross, and after a hasty chop at a small Italian restaurant opposite the station, we both drove to Grosvenor Square, in order to explain to Mabel our success in the solution of the cipher.
Carter, who admitted us, knew us so well that he conducted us straight upstairs to the great drawing-room, so artistically lit with its shaded electric lights placed cunningly in all sorts of out-of-the-way corners. Upon the table was a great old punch-bowl, full of splendid Gloire de Dijon roses, which the head gardener sent with the fruit from the house at Mayvill daily. Their arrangement was, I knew, by the hand of the woman whom for years I had secretly admired and loved. Upon a side table was a fine panel photograph of poor Burton Blair in a heavy silver frame, and upon the corner his daughter had placed a tiny bow of crape to honour the dead man’s memory. The great house was full of those womanly touches that betrayed the sweet sympathy of her character and the calm tranquillity of her life.
Presently the door opened, and we both rose to our feet, but instead of the bright, sunny-hearted girl with the musical voice and merry, open face, there entered the middle-aged bearded man in gold-rimmed glasses, who was once the bo’sun of the barque Annie Curtis of Liverpool, and afterwards had been the secret partner of Burton Blair.
“Good-evening, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, bowing with that forced veneer of polish he sometimes assumed. “I am very pleased to welcome you here in my late friend’s house. I have, as you will perceive, taken up my quarters here in accordance with the terms of poor Blair’s will, and I am pleased to have this opportunity of again meeting you.”