“Fordyce?” I echoed, puzzled.
“Yes, that was Mrs Heaton’s name before her marriage with you.”
“Then she was a widow?” I gasped.
He nodded in the affirmative.
I groaned. The affair grew more puzzling now that he declared himself an actual witness of my matrimonial misfortune.
But how could such a thing have taken place without my knowledge? It was impossible. The mystery, like the strange incidents which had preceded this remarkable situation in which I found myself, grew more and more inexplicable each hour.
We went forth, together, passing from room to room through the great country mansion. The place was handsome, of rather modern type, furnished glaringly in the manner which bespoke the parvenu. It possessed no mellow, time-worn appearance, as did the dear old Manor House beside the Severn. The furniture and hangings were too apparently of the Tottenham Court Road type, and the art displayed was that of the art furnisher given carte blanche to furnish with the newest and most fashionable fancies in the matter of wallpapers, dadoes, cornices, and art-pottery. There were art-carpets and art-curtains, art-cupboards and art-chairs, art-china and art-chintzes. Art was everywhere in painful enamel and impossible greens. There were pictures, too, but different, indeed, to the long row of noble faces with their ruffles and doublets and their arms painted on shields in the corners that looked down so solemnly in the great hall at Heaton. The pictures in that modern mansion were of the queue-de-siècle French school, daubs by the miscalled impressionists, some being rather too chic to be decent.
That a large amount of money had been expended upon the place I could not doubt, but the effect was that of dazzling the gaze by colour, and nowhere seemed there a good, comfortable old-fashioned sitting-room. All the apartments were arranged to please the eye, and not for personal comfort. The house was just the kind that a man suddenly successful in the city might set up in the vain endeavour to develop into a country gentleman; for to become such is the ideal of every silk-hatted business man, whether he trades in stocks or stockings.
“That I should be compelled to show you over your own house is, to say the least, very amusing,” said Gedge, as we were passing up the grand staircase. “If people were told of this they wouldn’t believe it possible.”
“I myself don’t believe what you tell me is possible,” I remarked. “But who gave orders for this furniture?”