Vera and her mysterious friend were together, calling in the most matter-of-fact way possible, and just as though nothing had happened! It seemed incredible!
All at once a dreadful thought occurred to me that made me catch my breath. Was it possible that my love was an actress, in the sense that she was acting a part? Had she cruelly deceived me when she had declared so earnestly that she loved me? The reflection that, were she practising deception, she would not have come to see me thus openly with the man with the black beard, relieved my feelings only a little. For how came she to be with Davies at all? And again, who was this man Davies? Also that telephone message a fortnight previously, how could I account for it under the circumstances?
“Oh, come to me—do come to me! I am in such trouble,” my love had cried so piteously, and then had added: “You alone can help me.”
Some one else, apparently, must have helped her. Could it have been this big, dark man?
And was he, in consequence, supplanting me in her affection? The thought held me breathless.
At times I am something of a philosopher, though my relatives laugh when I tell them so, and reply, “Not a philosopher, only a well-meaning fellow, and extremely good-natured”—a description I detest. Realising now the uselessness of worrying over the matter, I decided to make no further move, but to sit quiet and await developments.
“If you worry,” I often tell my friends, “it won’t in the least help to avert impending disaster, while if what you worry about never comes to pass, you have made yourself unhappy to no purpose.”
A platitude? Possibly. But two-thirds of the words of wisdom uttered by great men, and handed down as tradition to a worshipping posterity, are platitudes of the most commonplace type, if you really come to analyse them.
Time hung heavily. It generally ends by hanging heavily upon a man without occupation. But put yourself for a moment in my place. I had lost my love, and those days of inactivity and longing were doubly tedious because I ached to bestir myself somehow, anyhow, to clear up a mystery which, though gradually fading from the mind of a public ever athirst for fresh sensation, was actively alive in my own thoughts—the one thought, indeed, ever present in my mind. Why had the Thorolds so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared?
Thus it occurred to me, two days after Davies and Vera had called at my flat, to stroll down into Belgravia and interview the caretaker at 102, Belgrave Street. Possibly by this time, I reflected, he might have seen Sir Charles Thorold, or heard from him.