THE TEMPTING OF TAVERNAKE
By E. Phillips Oppenheim
CONTENTS
[ BOOK ONE. ]
[ CHAPTER I. ] DESPAIR AND INTEREST
[ CHAPTER II. ] A TETE-A-TETE SUPPER
[ CHAPTER III. ] AN UNPLEASANT MEETING
[ CHAPTER IV. ] BREAKFAST WITH BEATRICE
[ CHAPTER V. ] INTRODUCING Mrs. WENHAM GARDNER
[ CHAPTER VI. ] QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
[ CHAPTER VII. ] Mr. PRITCHARD OF NEW YORK
[ CHAPTER VIII. ] WOMAN'S WILES
[ CHAPTER IX. ] THE PLOT THICKENS
[ CHAPTER X. ] THE JOY OF BATTLE
[ CHAPTER XI. ] A BEWILDERING OFFER
[ CHAPTER XII. ] TAVERNAKE BLUNDERS
[ CHAPTER XIII. ] AN EVENING CALL
[ CHAPTER XIV. ] A WARNING FROM Mr. PRITCHARD
[ CHAPTER, XV. ] GENERAL DISCONTENT
[ CHAPTER XVI. ] AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE
[ CHAPTER XVII. ] THE BALCONY AT IMANO'S
[ CHAPTER XVIII. ] A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
[ CHAPTER XIX. ] TAVERNAKE INTERVENES
[ CHAPTER XX. ] A PLEASANT REUNION
[ CHAPTER XXI. ] SOME EXCELLENT ADVICE
[ CHAPTER XXII. ] DINNER WITH ELIZABETH
[ CHAPTER XXIII. ] ON AN ERRAND OF CHIVALRY
[ CHAPTER XXIV. ] CLOSE TO TRAGEDY
[ CHAPTER XXV. ] THE MADMAN TALKS
[ CHAPTER XXVI. ] A CRISIS
[ CHAPTER XXVII. ] TAVERNAKE CHOOSES
[ BOOK TWO.]
[ CHAPTER I. ] NEW HORIZONS
[ CHAPTER II. ] THE SIMPLE LIFE
[ CHAPTER III. ] OLD FRIENDS MEET
[ CHAPTER IV. ] PRITCHARD'S GOOD NEWS
[ CHAPTER V. ] BEATRICE REFUSES
[ CHAPTER VI. ] UNDERSTANDING COMES TOO LATE
[ CHAPTER VII. ] IN A VIRGIN COUNTRY
[ CHAPTER VIII. ] BACK TO CIVILIZATION
[ CHAPTER IX. ] FOR ALWAYS
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I. DESPAIR AND INTEREST
They stood upon the roof of a London boarding-house in the neighborhood of Russell Square—one of those grim shelters, the refuge of Transatlantic curiosity and British penury. The girl—she represented the former race was leaning against the frail palisading, with gloomy expression and eyes set as though in fixed contemplation of the uninspiring panorama. The young man—unmistakably, uncompromisingly English—stood with his back to the chimney a few feet away, watching his companion. The silence between them was as yet unbroken, had lasted, indeed, since she had stolen away from the shabby drawing-room below, where a florid lady with a raucous voice had been shouting a music-hall ditty. Close upon her heels, but without speech of any sort, he had followed. They were almost strangers, except for the occasional word or two of greeting which the etiquette of the establishment demanded. Yet she had accepted his espionage without any protest of word or look. He had followed her with a very definite object. Had she surmised it, he wondered? She had not turned her head or vouchsafed even a single question or remark to him since he had pushed his way through the trap-door almost at her heels and stepped out on to the leads. Yet it seemed to him that she must guess.
Below them, what seemed to be the phantasm of a painted city, a wilderness of housetops, of smoke-wreathed spires and chimneys, stretched away to a murky, blood-red horizon. Even as they stood there, a deeper color stained the sky, an angry sun began to sink into the piled up masses of thick, vaporous clouds. The girl watched with an air of sullen yet absorbed interest. Her companion's eyes were still fixed wholly and critically upon her. Who was she, he wondered? Why had she left her own country to come to a city where she seemed to have no friends, no manner of interest? In that caravansary of the world's stricken ones she had been an almost unnoticed figure, silent, indisposed for conversation, not in any obvious manner attractive. Her clothes, notwithstanding their air of having come from a first-class dressmaker, were shabby and out of fashion, their extreme neatness in itself pathetic. She was thin, yet not without a certain buoyant lightness of movement always at variance with her tired eyes, her ceaseless air of dejection. And withal she was a rebel. It was written in her attitude, it was evident in her lowering, militant expression, the smouldering fire in her eyes proclaimed it. Her long, rather narrow face was gripped between her hands; her elbows rested upon the brick parapet. She gazed at that world of blood-red mists, of unshapely, grotesque buildings, of strange, tawdry colors; she listened to the medley of sounds—crude, shrill, insistent, something like the groaning of a world stripped naked—and she had all the time the air of one who hates the thing she looks upon.
Tavernake, whose curiosity concerning his companion remained unappeased, decided that the moment for speech had arrived. He took a step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and clumsy; he wore also a suit of ready-made clothes with the air of one who knew that they were ready-made and was satisfied with them. People of a nervous or sensitive disposition would, without doubt, have found him irritating but for a certain nameless gift—an almost Napoleonic concentration upon the things of the passing moment, which was in itself impressive and which somehow disarmed criticism.
“About that bracelet!” he said at last.
She moved her head and looked at him. A young man of less assurance would have turned and fled. Not so Tavernake. Once sure of his ground he was immovable. There was murder in her eyes but he was not even disturbed.
“I saw you take it from the little table by the piano, you know,” he continued. “It was rather a rash thing to do. Mrs. Fitzgerald was looking for it before I reached the stairs. I expect she has called the police in by now.”
Slowly her hand stole into the depths of her pocket and emerged. Something flashed for a moment high over her head. The young man caught her wrist just in time, caught it in a veritable grip of iron. Then, indeed, the evil fires flashed from her eyes, her teeth gleamed white, her bosom rose and fell in a storm of angry, unuttered sobs. She was dry-eyed and still speechless, but for all that she was a tigress. A strangely-cut silhouette they formed there upon the housetops, with a background of empty sky, their feet sinking in the warm leads.
“I think I had better take it,” he said. “Let go.”
Her fingers yielded the bracelet—a tawdry, ill-designed affair of rubies and diamonds. He looked at it disapprovingly.
“That's an ugly thing to go to prison for,” he remarked, slipping it into his pocket. “It was a stupid thing to do, anyhow, you know. You couldn't have got away with it—unless,” he added, looking over the parapet as though struck with a sudden idea, “unless you had a confederate below.”
He heard the rush of her skirts and he was only just in time. Nothing, in fact, but a considerable amount of presence of mind and the full exercise of a strength which was continually providing surprises for his acquaintances, was sufficient to save her. Their struggles upon the very edge of the roof dislodged a brick from the palisading, which went hurtling down into the street. They both paused to watch it, his arms still gripping her and one foot pressed against an iron rod. It was immediately after they had seen it pitch harmlessly into the road that a new sensation came to this phlegmatic young man. For the first time in his life, he realized that it was possible to feel a certain pleasurable emotion in the close grasp of a being of the opposite sex. Consequently, although she had now ceased to struggle, he kept his arms locked around her, looking into her face with an interest intense enough, but more analytical than emotional, as though seeking to discover the meaning of this curious throbbing of his pulses. She herself, as though exhausted, remained quite passive, shivering a little in his grasp and breathing like a hunted animal whose last hour has come. Their eyes met; then she tore herself away.
“You are a hateful person,” she said deliberately, “a hateful, interfering person. I detest you.”
“I think that we will go down now,” he replied.
He raised the trap-door and glanced at her significantly. She held her skirts closely together and passed through it without looking at him. She stepped lightly down the ladder and without hesitation descended also a flight of uncarpeted attic stairs. Here, however, upon the landing, she awaited him with obvious reluctance.
“Are you going to send for the police?” she asked without looking at him.
“No,” he answered.
“Why not?”
“If I had meant to give you away I should have told Mrs. Fitzgerald at once that I had seen you take her bracelet, instead of following you out on to the roof.”
“Do you mind telling me what you do propose to do, then?” she continued still without looking at him, still without the slightest note of appeal in her tone.
He withdrew the bracelet from his pocket and balanced it upon his finger.
“I am going to say that I took it for a joke,” he declared.
She hesitated.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald's sense of humor is not elastic,” she warned him.
“She will be very angry, of course,” he assented, “but she will not believe that I meant to steal it.”
The girl moved slowly a few steps away.
“I suppose that I ought to thank you,” she said, still with averted face and sullen manner. “You have really been very decent. I am much obliged.”
“Are you not coming down?” he asked.
“Not at present,” she answered. “I am going to my room.”
He looked around the landing on which they stood, at the miserable, uncarpeted floor, the ill-painted doors on which the long-forgotten varnish stood out in blisters, the jumble of dilapidated hot-water cans, a mop, and a medley of brooms and rags all thrown down together in a corner.
“But these are the servants' quarters, surely,” he remarked.
“They are good enough for me; my room is here,” she told him, turning the handle of one of the doors and disappearing. The prompt turning of the key sounded, he thought, a little ungracious.
With the bracelet in his hand, Tavernake descended three more flights of stairs and entered the drawing-room of the private hotel conducted by Mrs. Raithby Lawrence, whose husband, one learned from her frequent reiteration of the fact, had once occupied a distinguished post in the Merchant Service of his country. The disturbance following upon the disappearance of the bracelet was evidently at its height. There were at least a dozen people in the room, most of whom were standing up. The central figure of them all was Mrs. Fitzgerald, large and florid, whose yellow hair with its varied shades frankly admitted its indebtedness to peroxide; a lady of the dashing type, who had once made her mark in the music-halls, but was now happily married to a commercial traveler who was seldom visible. Mrs. Fitzgerald was talking.
“In respectable boarding-houses, Mrs. Lawrence,” she declared with great emphasis, “thefts may sometimes take place, I will admit, in the servants' quarters, and with all their temptations, poor things, it's not so much to be wondered at. But no such thing as this has ever happened to me before—to have jewelry taken almost from my person in the drawing-room of what should be a well-conducted establishment. Not a servant in the room, remember, from the moment I took it off until I got up from the piano and found it missing. It's your guests you've got to look after, Mrs. Lawrence, sorry to say it though I am.”
Mrs. Lawrence managed here, through sheer loss of breath on the part of her assailant, to interpose a tearful protest.
“I am quite sure,” she protested feebly, “that there is not a person in this house who would dream of stealing anything, however valuable it was. I am most particular always about references.”
“Valuable, indeed!” Mrs. Fitzgerald continued with increased volubility. “I'd have you understand that I am not one of those who wear trumpery jewelry. Thirty-five guineas that bracelet cost me if it cost a penny, and if my husband were only at home I could show you the receipt.”
Then there came an interruption of almost tragical interest. Mrs. Fitzgerald, her mouth still open, her stream of eloquence suddenly arrested, stood with her artificially darkened eyes riveted upon the stolid, self-composed figure in the doorway. Every one else was gazing in the same direction. Tavernake was holding the bracelet in the palm of his hand.
“Thirty-five guineas!” he repeated. “If I had known that it was worth as much as that, I do not think that I should have dared to touch it.”
“You—you took it!” Mrs. Fitzgerald gasped.
“I am afraid,” he admitted, “that it was rather a clumsy joke. I apologize, Mrs. Fitzgerald. I hope you did not really imagine that it had been stolen.”
One was conscious of the little thrill of emotion which marked the termination of the episode. Most of the people not directly concerned were disappointed; they were being robbed of their excitement, their hopes of a tragical denouement were frustrated. Mrs. Lawrence's worn face plainly showed her relief. The lady with the yellow hair, on the other hand, who had now succeeded in working herself up into a towering rage, snatched the bracelet from the young man's fingers and with a purple flush in her cheeks was obviously struggling with an intense desire to box his ears.
“That's not good enough for a tale!” she exclaimed harshly. “I tell you I don't believe a word of it. Took it for a joke, indeed! I only wish my husband were here; he'd know what to do.”
“Your husband couldn't do much more than get your bracelet back, ma'am,” Mrs. Lawrence replied with acerbity. “Such a fuss and calling every one thieves, too! I'd be ashamed to be so suspicious.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald glared haughtily at her hostess.
“It's all very well for those that don't possess any jewelry and don't know the value of it, to talk,” she declared, with her eyes fixed upon a black jet ornament which hung from the other woman's neck. “What I say is this, and you may just as well hear it from me now as later. I don't believe this cock-and-bull story of Mr. Tavernake's. Them as took my bracelet from that table meant keeping it, only they hadn't the courage. And I'm not referring to you, Mr. Tavernake,” the lady continued vigorously, “because I don't believe you took it, for all your talk about a joke. And whom you may be shielding it wouldn't take me two guesses to name, and your motive must be clear to every one. The common hussy!”
“You are exciting yourself unnecessarily, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” Tavernake remarked. “Let me assure you that it was I who took your bracelet from that table.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald regarded him scornfully.
“Do you expect me to believe a tale like that?” she demanded.
“Why not?” Tavernake replied. “It is the truth. I am sorry that you have been so upset—”
“It is not the truth!”
More sensation! Another unexpected entrance! Once more interest in the affair was revived. After all, the lookers-on felt that they were not to be robbed of their tragedy. An old lady with yellow cheeks and jet black eyes leaned forward with her hand to her ear, anxious not to miss a syllable of what was coming. Tavernake bit his lip; it was the girl from the roof who had entered the room.
“I have no doubt,” she continued in a cool, clear tone, “that Mrs. Fitzgerald's first guess would have been correct. I took the bracelet. I did not take it for a joke, I did not take it because I admire it—I think it is hideously ugly. I took it because I had no money.”
She paused and looked around at them all, quietly, yet with something in her face from which they all shrank. She stood where the light fell full upon her shabby black gown and dejected-looking hat. The hollows in her pale cheeks, and the faint rims under her eyes, were clearly manifest; but notwithstanding her fragile appearance, she held herself with composure and even dignity. Twenty—thirty seconds must have passed whilst she stood there, slowly finishing the buttoning of her gloves. No one attempted to break the silence. She dominated them all—they felt that she had something more to say. Even Mrs. Fitzgerald felt a weight upon her tongue.
“It was a clumsy attempt,” she went on. “I should have had no idea where to raise money upon the thing, but I apologize to you, nevertheless, Mrs. Fitzgerald, for the anxiety which my removal of your valuable property must have caused you,” she added, turning to the owner of the bracelet, whose cheeks were once more hot with anger at the contempt in the girl's tone. “I suppose I ought to thank you, Mr. Tavernake, also, for your well-meant effort to preserve my character. In future, that shall be my sole charge. Has any one anything more to say to me before I go?”
Somehow or other, no one had. Mrs. Fitzgerald was irritated and fuming, but she contented herself with a snort. Her speech was ready enough as a rule, but there was a look in this girl's eyes from which she was glad enough to turn away. Mrs. Lawrence made a weak attempt at a farewell.
“I am sure,” she began, “we are all sorry for what's occurred and that you must go—not that perhaps it isn't better, under the circumstances,” she added hastily. “As regards—”
“There is nothing owing to you,” the girl interrupted calmly. “You may congratulate yourself upon that, for if there were you would not get it. Nor have I stolen anything else.”
“About your luggage?” Mrs. Lawrence asked.
“When I need it, I will send for it,” the girl replied.
She turned her back upon them and before they realized it she was gone. She had, indeed, something of the grand manner. She had come to plead guilty to a theft and she had left them all feeling a little like snubbed children. Mrs. Fitzgerald, as soon as the spell of the girl's presence was removed, was one of the first to recover herself. She felt herself beginning to grow hot with renewed indignation.
“A thief!” she exclaimed looking around the room. “Just an ordinary self-convicted thief! That's what I call her, and nothing else. And here we all stood like a lot of ninnies. Why, if I'd done my duty I'd have locked the door and sent for a policeman.”
“Too late now, anyway,” Mrs. Lawrence declared. “She's gone for good, and no mistake. Walked right out of the house. I heard her slam the front door.”
“And a good job, too,” Mrs. Fitzgerald armed. “We don't want any of her sort here—not those who've got things of value about them. I bet she didn't leave America for nothing.”
A little gray-haired lady, who had not as yet spoken, and who very seldom took part in any discussion at all, looked up from her knitting. She was desperately poor but she had charitable instincts.
“I wonder what made her want to steal,” she remarked quietly.
“A born thief,” Mrs. Fitzgerald declared with conviction,—“a real bad lot. One of your sly-looking ones, I call her.”
The little lady sighed.
“When I was better off,” she continued, “I used to help at a soup kitchen in Poplar. I have never forgotten a certain look we used to see occasionally in the faces of some of the men and women. I found out what it meant—it was hunger. Once or twice lately I have passed the girl who has just gone out, upon the stairs, and she almost frightened me. She had just the same look in her eyes. I noticed it yesterday—it was just before dinner, too—but she never came down.”
“She paid so much for her room and extra for meals,” Mrs. Lawrence said thoughtfully. “She never would have a meal unless she paid for it at the time. To tell you the truth, I was feeling a bit uneasy about her. She hasn't been in the dining-room for two days, and from what they tell me there's no signs of her having eaten anything in her room. As for getting anything out, why should she? It would be cheaper for her here than anywhere, if she'd got any money at all.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. The little old lady with the knitting looked down the street into the sultry darkness which had swallowed up the girl.
“I wonder whether Mr. Tavernake knows anything about her,” some one suggested.
But Tavernake was not in the room.
CHAPTER II. A TETE-A-TETE SUPPER
Tavernake caught her up in New Oxford Street and fell at once into step with her. He wasted no time whatever upon preliminaries.
“I should be glad,” he said, “if you would tell me your name.”
Her first glance at him was fierce enough to have terrified a different sort of man. Upon Tavernake it had absolutely no effect.
“You need not unless you like, of course,” he went on, “but I wish to talk to you for a few moments and I thought that it would be more convenient if I addressed you by name. I do not remember to have heard it mentioned at Blenheim House, and Mrs. Lawrence, as you know, does not introduce her guests.”
By this time they had walked a score or so of paces together. The girl, after her first furious glance, had taken absolutely no notice of him except to quicken her pace a little. Tavernake remained by her side, however, showing not the slightest sense of embarrassment or annoyance. He seemed perfectly content to wait and he had not in the least the appearance of a man who could be easily shaken off. From a fit of furious anger she passed suddenly and without warning to a state of half hysterical amusement.
“You are a foolish, absurd person,” she declared. “Please go away. I do not wish you to walk with me.”
Tavernake remained imperturbable. She remembered suddenly his intervention on her behalf.
“If you insist upon knowing,” she said, “my name at Blenheim House was Beatrice Burnay. I am much obliged to you for what you did for me there, but that is finished. I do not wish to have any conversation with you, and I absolutely object to your company. Please leave me at once.”
“I am sorry,” he answered, “but that is not possible.”
“Not possible?” she repeated, wonderingly.
He shook his head.
“You have no money, you have eaten no dinner, and I do not believe that you have any idea where you are going,” he declared, deliberately.
Her face was once more dark with anger.
“Even if that were the truth,” she insisted, “tell me what concern it is of yours? Your reminding me of these facts is simply an impertinence.”
“I am sorry that you look upon it in that light,” he remarked, still without the least sign of discomposure. “We will, if you do not mind, waive the discussion for the moment. Do you prefer a small restaurant or a corner in a big one? There is music at Frascati's but there are not so many people in the smaller ones.”
She turned half around upon the pavement and looked at him steadfastly. His personality was at last beginning to interest her. His square jaw and measured speech were indices of a character at least unusual. She recognized certain invincible qualities under an exterior absolutely commonplace.
“Are you as persistent about everything in life?” she asked him.
“Why not?” he replied. “I try always to be consistent.”
“What is your name?”
“Leonard Tavernake,” he answered, promptly.
“Are you well off—I mean moderately well off?”
“I have a quite sufficient income.”
“Have you any one dependent upon you?”
“Not a soul,” he declared. “I am my own master in every sense of the word.”
She laughed in an odd sort of way.
“Then you shall pay for your persistence,” she said,—“I mean that I may as well rob you of a sovereign as the restaurant people.”
“You must tell me now where you would like to go to,” he insisted. “It is getting late.”
“I do not like these foreign places,” she replied. “I should prefer to go to the grill-room of a good restaurant.”
“We will take a taxicab,” he announced. “You have no objection?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“If you have the money and don't mind spending it,” she said, “I will admit that I have had all the walking I want. Besides, the toe of my boot is worn through and I find it painful. Yesterday I tramped ten miles trying to find a man who was getting up a concert party for the provinces.”
“And did you find him?” he asked, hailing a cab.
“Yes, I found him,” she answered, indifferently. “We went through the usual programme. He heard me sing, tried to kiss me and promised to let me know. Nobody ever refuses anything in my profession, you see. They promise to let you know.”
“Are you a singer, then, or an actress?”
“I am neither,” she told him. “I said 'my profession' because it is the only one to which I have ever tried to belong. I have never succeeded in obtaining an engagement in this country. I do not suppose that even if I had persevered I should ever have had one.”
“You have given up the idea, then,” he remarked.
“I have given it up,” she admitted, a little curtly. “Please do not think, because I am allowing you to be my companion for a short time, that you may ask me questions. How fast these taxies go!”
They drew up at their destination—a well-known restaurant in Regent Street. He paid the cabman and they descended a flight of stairs into the grill-room.
“I hope that this place will suit you,” he said. “I have not much experience of restaurants.”
She looked around and nodded.
“Yes,” she replied, “I think that it will do.”
She was very shabbily dressed, and he, although his appearance was by no means ordinary, was certainly not of the type which inspires immediate respect in even the grill-room of a fashionable restaurant. Nevertheless, they received prompt and almost officious service. Tavernake, as he watched his companion's air, her manner of seating herself and accepting the attentions of the head waiter, felt that nameless impulse which was responsible for his having followed her from Blenheim House and which he could only call curiosity, becoming stronger. An exceedingly matter-of-fact person, he was also by instinct and habit observant. He never doubted but that she belonged to a class of society from which the guests at the boarding-house where they had both lived were seldom recruited, and of which he himself knew little. He was not in the least a snob, this young man, but he found the fact interesting. Life with him was already very much the same as a ledger account—a matter of debits and credits, and he had never failed to include among the latter that curious gift of breeding for which he himself, denied it by heritage, had somehow substituted a complete and exceedingly rare naturalness.
“I should like,” she announced, laying down the carte, “a fried sole, some cutlets, an ice, and black coffee.”
The waiter bowed.
“And for Monsieur?”
Tavernake glanced at his watch; it was already ten o'clock.
“I will take the same,” he declared.
“And to drink?”
She seemed indifferent.
“Any light wine,” she answered, carelessly, “white or red.”
Tavernake took up the wine list and ordered sauterne. They were left alone in their corner for a few minutes, almost the only occupants of the place.
“You are sure that you can afford this?” she asked, looking at him critically. “It may cost you a sovereign or thirty shillings.”
He studied the prices on the menu.
“I can afford it quite well and I have plenty of money with me,” he assured her, “but I do not think that it will cost more than eighteen shillings. While we are waiting for the sole, shall we talk? I can tell you, if you choose to hear, why I followed you from the boardinghouse.”
“I don't mind listening to you,” she told him, “or I will talk with you about anything you like. There is only one subject which I cannot discuss; that subject is myself and my own doings.”
Tavernake was silent for a moment.
“That makes conversation a bit difficult,” he remarked. She leaned back in her chair.
“After this evening,” she said, “I go out of your life as completely and finally as though I had never existed. I have a fancy to take my poor secrets with me. If you wish to talk, tell me about yourself. You have gone out of your way to be kind to me. I wonder why. It doesn't seem to be your role.”
He smiled slowly. His face was fashioned upon broad lines and the relaxing of his lips lightened it wonderfully. He had good teeth, clear gray eyes, and coarse black hair which he wore a trifle long; his forehead was too massive for good looks.
“No,” he admitted, “I do not think that benevolence is one of my characteristics.”
Her dark eyes were turned full upon him; her red lips, redder than ever they seemed against the pallor of her cheeks and her deep brown hair, curled slightly. There was something almost insolent in her tone.
“You understand, I hope,” she continued, “that you have nothing whatever to look for from me in return for this sum which you propose to expend for my entertainment?”
“I understand that,” he replied.
“Not even gratitude,” she persisted. “I really do not feel grateful to you. You are probably doing this to gratify some selfish interest or curiosity. I warn you that I am quite incapable of any of the proper sentiments of life.”
“Your gratitude would be of no value to me whatever,” he assured her.
She was still not wholly satisfied. His complete stolidity frustrated every effort she made to penetrate beneath the surface.
“If I believed,” she went on, “that you were one of those men—the world is full of them, you know—who will help a woman with a reasonable appearance so long as it does not seriously interfere with their own comfort—”
“Your sex has nothing whatever to do with it,” he interrupted. “As to your appearance, I have not even considered it. I could not tell you whether you are beautiful or ugly—I am no judge of these matters. What I have done, I have done because it pleased me to do it.”
“Do you always do what pleases you?” she asked.
“Nearly always.”
She looked him over again attentively, with an interest obviously impersonal, a trifle supercilious.
“I suppose,” she remarked, “you consider yourself one of the strong people of the world?”
“I do not know about that,” he answered. “I do not often think about myself.”
“I mean,” she explained, “that you are one of those people who struggle hard to get just what they want in life.”
His jaw suddenly tightened and she saw the likeness to Napoleon.
“I do more than struggle,” he affirmed, “I succeed. If I make up my mind to do a thing, I do it; if I make up my mind to get a thing, I get it. It means hard work sometimes, but that is all.”
For the first time, a really natural interest shone out of her eyes. The half sulky contempt with which she had received his advances passed away. She became at that moment a human being, self-forgetting, the heritage of her charms—for she really had a curious but very poignant attractiveness—suddenly evident. It was only a momentary lapse and it was entirely wasted. Not even one of the waiters happened to be looking that way, and Tavernake was thinking wholly of himself.
“It is a good deal to say—that,” she remarked, reflectively.
“It is a good deal but it is not too much,” he declared. “Every man who takes life seriously should say it.”
Then she laughed—actually laughed—and he had a vision of flashing white teeth, of a mouth breaking into pleasant curves, of dark mirth-lit eyes, lustreless no longer, provocative, inspiring. A vague impression as of something pleasant warmed his blood. It was a rare thing for him to be so stirred, but even then it was not sufficient to disturb the focus of his thoughts.
“Tell me,” she demanded, “what do you do? What is your profession or work?”
“I am with a firm of auctioneers and estate agents,” he answered readily,—“Messrs. Dowling, Spence & Company the name is. Our offices are in Waterloo Place.”
“You find it interesting?”
“Of course,” he answered. “Interesting? Why not? I work at it.”
“Are you a partner?”
“No,” he admitted. “Six years ago I was a carpenter; then I became an errand boy in Mr. Dowling's office I had to learn the business, you see. To-day I am a sort of manager. In eighteen months' time—perhaps before that if they do not offer me a partnership—I shall start for myself.”
Once more the subtlest of smiles flickered at the corners of her lips.
“Do they know yet?” she asked, with faint irony.
“Not yet,” he replied, with absolute seriousness. “They might tell me to go, and I have a few things to learn yet. I would rather make experiments for some one else than for myself. I can use the results later; they will help me to make money.”
She laughed softly and wiped the tears out of her eyes. They were really very beautiful eyes notwithstanding the dark rims encircling them.
“If only I had met you before!” she murmured.
“Why?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Don't ask me,” she begged. “It would not be good for your conceit, if you have any, to tell you.”
“I have no conceit and I am not inquisitive,” he said, “but I do not see why you laughed.”
Their period of waiting came to an end at this point. The fish was brought and their conversation became disjointed. In the silence which followed, the old shadow crept over her face. Once only it lifted. It was while they were waiting for the cutlets. She leaned towards him, her elbows upon the tablecloth, her face supported by her fingers.
“I think that it is time we left these generalities,” she insisted, “and you told me something rather more personal, something which I am very anxious to know. Tell me exactly why so self-centered a person as yourself should interest himself in a fellow-creature at all. It seems odd to me.”
“It is odd,” he admitted, frankly. “I will try to explain it to you but it will sound very bald, and I do not think that you will understand. I watched you a few nights ago out on the roof at Blenheim House. You were looking across the house-tops and you didn't seem to be seeing anything at all really, and yet all the time I knew that you were seeing things I couldn't, you were understanding and appreciating something which I knew nothing of, and it worried me. I tried to talk to you that evening, but you were rude.”
“You really are a curious person,” she remarked. “Are you always worried, then, if you find that some one else is seeing things or understanding things which are outside your comprehension?”
“Always,” he replied promptly.
“You are too far-reaching,” she affirmed. “You want to gather everything into your life. You cannot. You will only be unhappy if you try. No man can do it. You must learn your limitations or suffer all your days.”
“Limitations!” He repeated the words with measureless scorn. “If I learn them at all,” he declared, with unexpected force, “it will be with scars and bruises, for nothing else will content me.”
“We are, I should say, almost the same age,” she remarked slowly.
“I am twenty-five,” he told her.
“I am twenty-two,” she said. “It seems strange that two people whose ideas of life are as far apart as the Poles should have come together like this even for a moment. I do not understand it at all. Did you expect that I should tell you just what I saw in the clouds that night?”
“No,” he answered, “not exactly. I have spoken of my first interest in you only. There are other things. I told a lie about the bracelet and I followed you out of the boarding-house and I brought you here, for some other for quite a different reason.”
“Tell me what it was,” she demanded.
“I do not know it myself,” he declared solemnly. “I really and honestly do not know it. It is because I hoped that it might come to me while we were together, that I am here with you at this moment. I do not like impulses which I do not understand.”
She laughed at him a little scornfully.
“After all,” she said, “although it may not have dawned upon you yet, it is probably the same wretched reason. You are a man and you have the poison somewhere in your blood. I am really not bad-looking, you know.”
He looked at her critically. She was a little over-slim, perhaps, but she was certainly wonderfully graceful. Even the poise of her head, the manner in which she leaned back in her chair, had its individuality. Her features, too, were good, though her mouth had grown a trifle hard. For the first time the dead pallor of her cheeks was relieved by a touch of color. Even Tavernake realized that there were great possibilities about her. Nevertheless, he shook his head.
“I do not agree with you in the least,” he asserted firmly. “Your looks have nothing to do with it. I am sure that it is not that.”
“Let me cross-examine you,” she suggested. “Think carefully now. Does it give you no pleasure at all to be sitting here alone with me?”
He answered her deliberately; it was obvious that he was speaking the truth.
“I am not conscious that it does,” he declared. “The only feeling I am aware of at the present moment in connection with you, is the curiosity of which I have already spoken.”
She leaned a little towards him, extending her very shapely fingers. Once more the smile at her lips transformed her face.
“Look at my hand,” she said. “Tell me—wouldn't you like to hold it just for a minute, if I gave it you?”
Her eyes challenged his, softly and yet imperiously. His whole attention, however, seemed to be absorbed by her finger-nails. It seemed strange to him that a girl in her straits should have devoted so much care to her hands.
“No,” he answered deliberately, “I have no wish to hold your hand. Why should I?”
“Look at me,” she insisted.
He did so without embarrassment or hesitation,—it was more than ever apparent that he was entirely truthful. She leaned back in her chair, laughing softly to herself.
“Oh, my friend Mr. Leonard Tavernake,” she exclaimed, “if you were not so crudely, so adorably, so miraculously truthful, what a prig, prig, prig, you would be! The cutlets at last, thank goodness! Your cross-examination is over. I pronounce you 'Not Guilty!”'
During the progress of the rest of the meal, they talked very little. At its conclusion, Tavernake discharged the bill, having carefully checked each item and tipped the waiter the exact amount which the man had the right to expect. They ascended the stairs together to the street, the girl lingering a few steps behind. On the pavement her fingers touched his arm.
“I wonder, would you mind driving me down to the Embankment?” she asked almost humbly. “It was so close down there and I want some air.”
This was an extravagance which he had scarcely contemplated, but he did not hesitate. He called a taxicab and seated himself by her side. Her manner seemed to have grown quieter and more subdued, her tone was no longer semi-belligerent.
“I will not keep you much longer,” she promised. “I suppose I am not so strong as I used to be. I have had scarcely anything to eat for two days and conversation has become an unknown luxury. I think—it seems absurd—but I think that I am feeling a little faint.”
“The air will soon revive you,” he said. “As to our conversation, I am disappointed. I think that you are very foolish not to tell me more about yourself.”
She closed her eyes, ignoring his remark. They turned presently into a narrower thoroughfare. She leaned towards him.
“You have been very good to me,” she admitted almost timidly, “and I am afraid that I have not been very gracious. We shall not see one another again after this evening. I wonder—would you care to kiss me?”
He opened his lips and closed them again. He sat quite still, his eyes fixed upon the road ahead, until he had strangled something absolutely absurd, something unrecognizable.
“I would rather not,” he decided quietly. “I know you mean to be kind but that sort of thing—well, I don't think I understand it. Besides,” he added with a sudden naive relief, as he clutched at a fugitive but plausible thought, “if I did you would not believe the things which I have been telling you.”
He had a curious idea that she was disappointed as she turned her head away, but she said nothing. Arrived at the Embankment, the cab came slowly to a standstill. The girl descended. There was something new in her manner; she looked away from him when she spoke.
“You had better leave me here,” she said. “I am going to sit upon that seat.”
Then came those few seconds' hesitation which were to count for a great deal in his life. The impulse which bade him stay with her was unaccountable but it conquered.
“If you do not object,” he remarked with some stiffness, “I should like to sit here with you for a little time. There is certainly a breeze.”
She made no comment but walked on. He paid the man and followed her to the empty seat. Opposite, some illuminated advertisements blazed their unsightly message across the murky sky. Between the two curving rows of yellow lights the river flowed—black, turgid, hopeless. Even here, though they had escaped from its absolute thrall, the far-away roar of the city beat upon their ears. She listened to it for a moment and then pressed her hands to the side of her head.
“Oh, how I hate it!” she moaned. “The voices, always the voices, calling, threatening, beating you away! Take my hands, Leonard Tavernake,—hold me.”
He did as she bade him, clumsily, as yet without comprehension.
“You are not well,” he muttered.
Her eyes opened and a flash of her old manner returned. She smiled at him, feebly but derisively.
“You foolish boy!” she cried. “Can't you see that I am dying? Hold my hands tightly and watch—watch! Here is one more thing you can see—that you cannot understand.”
He saw the empty phial slip from her sleeve and fall on to the pavement. With a cry he sprang up and, carrying her in his arms, rushed out into the road.
CHAPTER III. AN UNPLEASANT MEETING
It was a quarter past eleven and the theatres were disgorging their usual nightly crowds. The most human thoroughfare in any of the world's great cities was at its best and brightest. Everywhere commissionaires were blowing their whistles, the streets were thronged with slowly-moving vehicles, the pavements were stirring with life. The little crowd which had gathered in front of the chemist's shop was swept away. After all, none of them knew exactly what they had been waiting for. There was a rumor that a woman had fainted or had met with an accident. Certainly she had been carried into the shop and into the inner room, the door of which was still closed. A few passers-by had gathered together and stared and waited for a few minutes, but had finally lost interest and melted away. A human thoroughfare, this, indeed, one of the pulses of the great city beating time night and day to the tragedies of life. The chemist's assistant, with impassive features, was serving a couple of casual customers from behind the counter. Only a few yards away, beyond the closed door, the chemist himself and a hastily summoned doctor fought with Death for the body of the girl who lay upon the floor, faint moans coming every now and then from her blue lips.
Tavernake, whose forced inaction during that terrible struggle had become a burden to him, slipped softly from the room as soon as the doctor had whispered that the acute crisis was over, and passed through the shop out into the street, a solemn, dazed figure among the light-hearted crowd. Even in those grim moments, the man's individualism spoke up to him. He was puzzled at his own action, He asked himself a question—not, indeed, with regret, but with something more than curiosity and actual selfprobing—as though, by concentrating his mind upon his recent course of action, he would be able to understand the motives which had influenced him. Why had he chosen to burden himself with the care of this desperate young woman? Supposing she lived, what was to become of her? He had acquired a certain definite responsibility with regard to her future, for whatever the doctor and his assistant might do, it was his own promptitude and presence of mind which had given her the first chance of life. Without a doubt, he had behaved foolishly. Why not vanish into the crowd and have done with it? What was it to him, after all, whether this girl lived or died? He had done his duty—more than his duty. Why not disappear now and let her take her chance? His common sense spoke to him loudly; such thoughts as these beat upon his brain.
Just for once in his life, however, his common sense exercised an altogether subordinate position. He knew very well, even while he listened to these voices, that he was only counting the minutes until he could return. Having absolutely decided that the only reasonable course left for him to pursue was to return home and leave the girl to her fate, he found himself back inside the shop within a quarter of an hour. The chemist had just come out from the inner room, and looked up at his entrance.
“She'll do now,” he announced.
Tavernake nodded. He was amazed at his own sense of relief.
“I am glad,” he declared.
The doctor joined them, his black bag in his hand, prepared for departure. He addressed himself to Tavernake as the responsible person.
“The young lady will be all right now,” he said, “but she may be rather queer for a day or two. Fortunately, she made the usual mistake of people who are ignorant of medicine and its effects—she took enough poison to kill a whole household. You had better take care of her, young man,” he added dryly. “She'll be getting into trouble if she tries this sort of thing again.”
“Will she need any special attention during the next few days?” Tavernake asked. “The circumstances under which I brought her here are a little unusual, and I am not quite sure—”
“Take her home to bed,” the doctor interrupted, “and you'll find she'll sleep it off. She seems to have a splendid constitution, although she has let herself run down. If you need any further advice and your own medical man is not available, I will come and see her if you send for me. Camden, my name is; telephone number 734 Gerrard.”
“I should be glad to know the amount of your fee, if you please,” Tavernake said.
“My fee is two guineas,” the doctor answered.
Tavernake paid him and he went away. Already the shadow of the tragedy was passing. The chemist had joined his assistant and was busy dispensing drugs behind his counter.
“You can go in to the young lady, if you like,” he remarked to Tavernake. “I dare say she'll feel better to have some one with her.”
Tavernake passed slowly into the inner room, closing the door behind him. He was scarcely prepared for so piteous a sight. The girl's face was white and drawn as she lay upon the couch to which they had lifted her. The fighting spirit was dead; she was in a state of absolute and complete collapse. She opened her eyes at his coning, but closed them again almost immediately—less, it seemed, from any consciousness of his presence than from sheer exhaustion.
“I am glad that you are better,” he whispered crossing the room to her side.
“Thank you,” she murmured almost inaudibly.
Tavernake stood looking down upon her, and his sense of perplexity increased. Stretched on the hard horsehair couch she seemed, indeed, pitifully thin and younger than her years. The scowl, which had passed from her face, had served in some measure as a disguise.
“We shall have to leave here in a few minutes,” he said, softly. “They will want to close the shop.”
“I am so sorry,” she faltered, “to have given you all this trouble. You must send me to a hospital or the workhouse—anywhere.”
“You are sure that there are no friends to whom I can send?” he asked.
“There is no one!”
She closed her eyes and Tavernake sat quite still on the end of her couch, his elbow upon his knee, his head resting upon his hand. Presently, the rush of customers having ceased, the chemist came in.
“I think, if I were you, I should take her home now,” he remarked. “She'll probably drop off to sleep very soon and wake up much stronger. I have made up a prescription here in case of exhaustion.”
Tavernake stared at the man. Take her home! His sense of humor was faint enough but he found himself trying to imagine the faces of Mrs. Lawrence or Mrs. Fitzgerald if he should return with her to the boardinghouse at such an hour.
“I suppose you know where she lives?” the chemist inquired curiously.
“Of course,” Tavernake assented. “You are quite right. I dare say she is strong enough now to walk as far as the pavement.”
He paid the bill for the medicines, and they lifted her from the couch. Between them she walked slowly into the outer shop. Then she began to drag on their arms and she looked up at the chemist a little piteously.
“May I sit down for a moment?” she begged. “I feel faint.”
They placed her in one of the cane chairs facing the door. The chemist mixed her some sal volatile.
“I am sorry,” she murmured, “so sorry. In a few minutes—I shall be better.”
Outside, the throng of pedestrians had grown less, but from the great restaurant opposite a constant stream of motor-cars and carriages was slowly bringing away the supper guests. Tavernake stood at the door, watching them idly. The traffic was momentarily blocked and almost opposite to him a motor-car, the simple magnificence of which filled him with wonder, had come to a standstill. The chauffeur and footman both wore livery which was almost white. Inside a swinging vase of flowers was suspended from the roof. A man and a woman leaned back in luxurious easy-chairs. The man was dark and had the look of a foreigner. The woman was very fair. She wore a long ermine cloak and a tiara of pearls.
Tavernake, whose interest in the passing throngs was entirely superficial, found himself for some reason curiously attracted by this glimpse into a world of luxury of which he knew nothing; attracted, too, by the woman's delicate face with its uncommon type of beauty. Their eyes met as he stood there, stolid and motionless, framed in the doorway. Tavernake continued to stare, unmindful, perhaps unconscious, of the rudeness of his action. The woman, after a moment, glanced away at the shopwindow. A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She spoke through the tube at her side and turned to her companion. Meanwhile, the footman, leaning from his place, held out his arm in warning and the car was slowly backed to the side of the pavement. The lady felt for a moment in a bag of white satin which lay upon the round table in front of her, and handed a slip of paper through the open window to the servant who had already descended and was standing waiting. He came at once towards the shop, passing Tavernake, who remained in the door-way.
“Will you make this up at once, please?” he directed, handing the paper across to the chemist.
The chemist took it in his hand and turned away mechanically toward the dispensing room. Suddenly he paused, and, looking back, shook his head.
“For whom is this prescription required?” he asked.
“For my mistress,” the man answered. “Her name is there.”
“Where is she?”
“Outside; she is waiting for it.”
“If she really wants this made up to-night,” the chemist declared, “she must come in and sign the book.”
The footman looked across the counter, for a moment, a little blankly.
“Am I to tell her that?” he inquired. “It's only a sleeping draught. Her regular chemist makes it up all right.”
“That may be,” the man behind the counter replied, “but, you see, I am not her regular chemist. You had better go and tell her so.”
The footman departed upon his errand without a glance at the girl who was sitting within a few feet of him.
“I am very sorry, madam,” he announced to his mistress, “that the chemist declines to make up the prescription unless you sign the book.”
“Very well, then, I will come,” she declared.
The woman, handed from the automobile by her servant, lifted her white satin skirts in both hands and stepped lightly across the pavement. Tavernake stood on one side to let her pass. She seemed to him to be, indeed, a creature of that other world of which he knew nothing. Her slow, graceful movements, the shimmer of her skirt, her silk stockings, the flashing of the diamond buckles upon her shoes, the faint perfume from her clothes, the soft touch of her ermine as she swept by—all these things were indeed strange to him. His eyes followed her with rapt interest as she approached the counter.
“You wish me to sign for my prescription?” she asked the chemist. “I will do so, with pleasure, if it is necessary, only you must not keep me waiting long.”
Her voice was very low and very musical; the slight smile which had parted her tired lips, was almost pathetic. Even the chemist felt himself to be a human being. He turned at once to his shelves and began to prepare the drug.
“I am sorry, madam, that it should have been necessary to fetch you in,” he said, apologetically. “My assistant will give you the book if you will kindly sign it.”
The assistant dived beneath the counter, reappearing almost immediately with a black volume and a pen and ink. The chemist was engrossed upon his task; Tavernake's eyes were still riveted upon this woman, who seemed to him the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in life. No one was watching the girl. The chemist was the first to see her face, and that only in a looking glass. He stopped in the act of mixing his drug and turned slowly round. His expression was such that they all followed his eyes. The girl was sitting up in her chair, with a sudden spot of color burning in her cheeks, her fingers gripping the counter as though for support, her eyes dilated, unnatural, burning in their white setting with an unholy fire. The lady was the last to turn her head, and the bottle of eau-de-cologne which she had taken up from the counter, slipped with a crash to the floor. All expression seemed to pass from her face; the very life seemed drawn from it. Those who were watching her saw suddenly an old woman looking at something of which she was afraid.
The girl seemed to find an unnatural strength. She dragged herself up and turned wildly to Tavernake.
“Take me away,” she cried, in a low voice. “Take me away at once.”
The woman at the counter did not speak. Tavernake stepped quickly forward and then hesitated. The girl was on her feet now and she clutched at his arms. Her eyes besought him.
“You must take me away, please,” she begged, hoarsely. “I am well now—quite well. I can walk.”
Tavernake's lack of imagination stood him in good stead then. He simply did what he was told, did it in perfectly mechanical fashion, without asking any questions. With the girl leaning heavily upon his arm, he stepped into the street and almost immediately into a passing taxicab which he had hailed from the threshold of the shop. As he closed the door, he glanced behind him. The woman was standing there, half turned towards him, still with that strange, stony look upon her lifeless face. The chemist was bending across the counter towards her, wondering, perhaps, if another incident were to be drawn into his night's work. The eau-de-cologne was running in a little stream across the floor.
“Where to, sir?” the taxicab driver asked Tavernake.
“Where to?” Tavernake repeated.
The girl was clinging to his arm.
“Tell him to drive away from here,” she whispered, “to drive anywhere, but away from here.”
“Drive straight on,” Tavernake directed, “along Fleet Street and up Holborn. I will give you the address later on.”
The man changed his speed and their pace increased. Tavernake sat quite still, dumfounded by these amazing happenings. The girl by his side was clutching his arm, sobbing a little hysterically, holding him all the time as though in terror.
CHAPTER IV. BREAKFAST WITH BEATRICE
The girl, awakened, perhaps, by the passing of some heavy cart along the street below, or by the touch of the sunbeam which lay across her pillow, first opened her eyes and then, after a preliminary stare around, sat up in bed. The events of the previous night slowly shaped themselves in her mind. She remembered everything up to the commencement of that drive in the taxicab. Sometime after that she must have fainted. And now—what had become of her? Where was she?
She looked around her in ever-increasing surprise. Certainly it was the strangest room she had ever been in. The floor was dusty and innocent of any carpet; the window was bare and uncurtained. The walls were unpapered but covered here and there with strange-looking plans, one of them taking up nearly the whole side of the room—a very rough piece of work with little dabs of blue paint here and there, and shadings and diagrams which were absolutely unintelligible. She herself was lying upon a battered iron bedstead, and she was wearing a very coarse nightdress. Her own clothes were folded up and lay upon a piece of brown paper on the floor by the side of the bed. To all appearance, the room was entirely unfurnished, except that in the middle of it was a hideous papier mache screen.
After her first bewildered inspection of her surroundings, it was upon this screen that her attention was naturally directed. Obviously it must be there to conceal something. Very carefully she leaned out of bed until she was able to see around the corner of it. Then her heart gave a little jump and she was only just able to stifle an exclamation of fear. Some one was sitting there—a man—sitting on a battered cane chair, bending over a roll of papers which were stretched upon a rude deal table. She felt her cheeks grow hot. It must be Tavernake! Where had he brought her? What did his presence in the room mean?
The bed creaked heavily as she regained her former position. A voice came to her from behind the screen. She knew it at once. It was Tavernake's.
“Are you awake?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered,—“yes, I am awake. Is that Mr. Tavernake? Where am I, please?”
“First of all, are you better?” he inquired.
“I am better,” she assured him, sitting up in bed and pulling the clothes to her chin. “I am quite well now. Tell me at once where I am and what you are doing over there.”
“There is nothing to be terrified about,” Tavernake answered. “To all effects and purposes, I am in another room. When I move to the door, as I shall do directly, I shall drag the screen with me. I can promise you—”
“Please explain everything,” she begged, “quickly. I am most—uncomfortable.”
“At half-past twelve this morning,” Tavernake said, “I found myself alone in a taxicab with you, without any luggage or any idea where to go to. To make matters worse, you fainted. I tried two hotels but they refused to take you in; they were probably afraid that you were going to be ill. Then I thought of this room. I am employed, as you know, by a firm of estate agents. I do a great deal of work on my own account, however, which I prefer to do in secret, and unknown to any one. For that reason, I hired this room a year ago and I come here most evenings to work. Sometimes I stay late, so last month I bought a small bedstead and had it fixed up here. There is a woman who comes in to clean the room. I went to her house last night and persuaded her to come here. She undressed you and put you to bed. I am sorry that my presence here distresses you, but it is a large building and quite empty at night-time. I thought you might wake up and be frightened, so I borrowed this screen from the woman and have been sitting here.”
“What, all night?” she gasped.
“Certainly,” he answered. “The woman could not stop herself and this is not a residential building at all. All the lower floors are let for offices and warehouses, and there is no one else in the place until eight o'clock.”
She put her hands to her head and sat quite still for a moment or two. It was really hard to take everything in.
“Aren't you very sleepy?” she asked, irrelevantly.
“Not very,” he replied. “I dozed for an hour, a little time ago. Since then I have been looking through some plans which interest me very much.”
“Can I get up?” she inquired, timidly.
“If you feel strong enough, please do,” he answered, with manifest relief. “I shall move towards the door, dragging the screen in front of me. You will find a brush and comb and some hairpins on your clothes. I could not think of anything else to get for you, but, if you will dress, we will walk to London Bridge Station, which is just across the way, and while I order some breakfast you can go into the ladies' room and do your hair properly. I did my best to get hold of a looking-glass, but it was quite impossible.”
The girl's sense of humor was suddenly awake. She had hard work not to scream. He had evidently thought out all these details in painstaking fashion, one by one.
“Thank you,” she said. “I will get up immediately, if you will do as you say.”
He clutched the screen from the inside and dragged it towards the door. On the threshold, he spoke to her once more.
“I shall sit upon the stairs just outside,” he announced.
“I sha'n't be more than five minutes,” she assured him.
She sprang out of bed and dressed quickly. There was nothing beyond where the screen had been except a table covered with plans, and a particularly hard cane chair which she dragged over for her own use. As she dressed, she began to realize how much this matter-of-fact, unimpressionable young man had done for her during the last few hours. The reflection affected her in a curious manner. She became afflicted with a shyness which she had not felt when he was in the room. When at last she had finished her toilette and opened the door, she was almost tongue-tied. He was sitting on the top step, with his back against the landing, and his eyes were closed. He opened them with a little start, however, as soon as he heard her approach.
“I am glad you have not been long,” he remarked. “I want to be at my office at nine o'clock and I must go and have a bath somewhere. These stairs are rather steep. Please walk carefully.”
She followed him in silence down three flights of stone steps. On each landing there were names upon the doors—two firms of hop merchants, a solicitor, and a commission agent. The ground floor was some sort of warehouse, from which came a strong smell of leather.
Tavernake opened the outside door with a small key and they passed into the street.
“London Bridge Station is just across the way,” he said. “The refreshment room will be open and we can get some breakfast at once.”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“About half-past seven.”
She walked by his side quite meekly, and although there were many things which she was longing to say, she remained absolutely without the power of speech. Except that he was looking a little crumpled, there was nothing whatever in his appearance to indicate that he had been up all night. He looked exactly as he had done on the previous day, he seemed even quite unconscious that there was anything unusual in their relations. As soon as they arrived at the station, he pointed to the ladies' waiting-room.
“If you will go in and arrange your hair there,” he said, “I will go and order breakfast and have a shave. I will be back here in about twenty minutes. You had better take this.”
He offered her a shilling and she accepted it without hesitation. As soon as he had gone, however, she looked at the coin in her hand in blank wonder. She had accepted it from him with perfect naturalness and without even saying “Thank you!” With a queer little laugh, she pushed open the swinging doors and made her way into the waiting-room.
In hardly more than a quarter of an hour she emerged, to find Tavernake waiting for her. He had retied his tie, bought a fresh collar, had been shaved. She, too, had improved her appearance.
“Breakfast is waiting this way,” he announced.
She followed him obediently and they sat down at a small table in the station refreshment-room.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she asked, suddenly, “I must ask you something. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
“Nothing,” he assured her, with some emphasis.
“You seem to take everything so much as a matter of course,” she protested.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don't know,” she replied, a little feebly. “Only—”
She found relief in a sudden and perfectly natural laugh.
“Come,” he said, “that is better. I am glad that you feel like laughing.”
“As a matter of fact,” she declared, “I feel much more like crying. Don't you know that you were very foolish last night? You ought to have left me alone. Why didn't you? You would have saved yourself a great deal of trouble.”
He nodded, as though that point of view did, in some degree, commend itself to him.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I suppose I should. I do not, even now, understand why I interfered. I can only remember that it didn't seem possible not to at the time. I suppose one must have impulses,” he added, with a little frown.
“The reflection,” she remarked, helping herself to another roll, “seems to annoy you.”
“It does,” he confessed. “I do not like to feel impelled to do anything the reason for which is not apparent. I like to do just the things which seem likely to work out best for myself.”
“How you must hate me!” she murmured.
“No, I do not hate you,” he replied, “but, on the other hand, you have certainly been a trouble to me. First of all, I told a falsehood at the boarding-house, and I prefer always to tell the truth when I can. Then I followed you out of the house, which I disliked doing very much, and I seem to have spent a considerable portion of the time since, in your company, under somewhat extraordinary circumstances. I do not understand why I have done this.”
“I suppose it is because you are a very good-hearted person,” she remarked.
“But I am not,” he assured her, calmly. “I am nothing of the sort. I have very little sympathy with good-hearted people. I think the world goes very much better when every one looks after himself, and the people who are not competent to do so go to the wall.”
“It sounds a trifle selfish,” she murmured.
“Perhaps it is. I have an idea that if I could phrase it differently it would become philosophy.”
“Perhaps,” she suggested, smiling across the table at him, “you have really done all this because you like me.”
“I am quite sure that it is not that,” he declared. “I feel an interest in you for which I cannot account, but it does not seem to me to be a personal one. Last night,” he continued, “when I was sitting there waiting, I tried to puzzle it all out. I came to the conclusion that it was because you represent something which I do not understand. I am very curious and it always interests me to learn. I believe that must be the secret of my interest in you.”
“You are very complimentary,” she told him, mockingly. “I wonder what there is in the world which I could teach so superior a person as Mr. Tavernake?”
He took her question quite seriously.
“I wonder what there is myself,” he answered. “And yet, in a way, I think I know.”
“Your imagination should come to the rescue,” she remarked.
“I have no imagination,” he declared, gloomily.
They were silent for several minutes; she was still studying him.
“I wonder you don't ask me any questions about myself,” she said, abruptly.
“There is only one thing,” he answered, “concerning which I am in the least curious. Last night in the chemist's shop—”
“Don't!” she begged him, with suddenly whitening face. “Don't speak of that!”
“Very well,” he replied, indifferently. “I thought that you were rather inviting my questions. You need not be afraid of any more. I really am not curious about personal matters; I find that my own life absorbs all my interests.”
They had finished breakfast and he paid the bill. She began to put on her gloves.
“Whatever happens to me,” she said, “I shall never forget that you have been very kind.”
She hesitated for a moment and then she seemed to realize more completely how really kind he had been. There had been a certain crude delicacy about his actions which she had under-appreciated. She leaned towards him. There was nothing left this morning of that disfiguring sullenness. Her mouth was soft; her eyes were bright, almost appealing. If Tavernake had been a judge of woman's looks, he must certainly have found her attractive.
“I am very, very grateful to you,” she continued, holding out her hand. “I shall always remember how kind you were. Good-bye!”
“You are not going?” he asked.
She laughed.
“Why, you didn't imagine that you had taken the care of me upon your shoulders for the rest of your life?” she demanded.
“No, I didn't imagine that,” he answered. “At the same time, what plans have you made? Where are you going?”
“Oh! I shall think of something,” she declared, indifferently.
He caught the gleam in her eyes, the sudden hopelessness which fell like a cloud upon her face. He spoke promptly and with decision.
“As a matter of fact,” he remarked, “you do not know yourself. You are just going to drift out of this place and very likely find your way to a seat on the Embankment again.”
Her lips quivered. She had tried to be brave but it was hard.
“Not necessarily,” she replied. “Something may turn up.”
He leaned a little across the table towards her.
“Listen,” he said, deliberately, “I will make a proposition to you. It has come to me during the last few minutes. I am tired of the boarding-house and I wish to leave it. The work which I do at night is becoming more and more important. I should like to take two rooms somewhere. If I take a third, would you care to call yourself what I called you to the charwoman last night—my sister? I should expect you to look after the meals and my clothes, and help me in certain other ways. I cannot give you much of a salary,” he continued, “but you would have an opportunity during the daytime of looking out for some work, if that is what you want, and you would at least have a roof and plenty to eat and drink.”
She looked at him in blank amazement. It was obvious that his proposition was entirely honest.
“But, Mr. Tavernake,” she protested, “you forget that I am not really your sister.”
“Does that matter?” he asked, without flinching. “I think you understand the sort of person I am. You would have nothing to fear from any admiration on my part—or anything of that sort,” he added, with some show of clumsiness. “Those things do not come in my life. I am ambitious to get on, to succeed and become wealthy. Other things I do not even think about.”
She was speechless. After a short pause, he went on.
“I am proposing this arrangement as much for my own sake as for yours. I am very well read and I know most of what there is to be known in my profession. But there are other things concerning which I am ignorant. Some of these things I believe you could teach me.”
Still speechless, she sat and looked at him for several moments. Outside, the station now was filled with a hurrying throng on their way to the day's work. Engines were shrieking, bells ringing, the press of footsteps was unceasing. In the dark, ill-ventilated room itself there was the rattle of crockery, the yawning of discontented-looking young women behind the bar, young women with their hair still in curl-papers, as yet unprepared for their weak little assaults upon the good-nature or susceptibility of their customers. A queer corner of life it seemed. She looked at her companion and realized how fragmentary was her knowledge of him. There was nothing to be gathered from his face. He seemed to have no expression. He was simply waiting for her reply, with his thoughts already half engrossed upon the business of the day.
“Really,” she began, “I—”
He came back from his momentary wandering and looked at her. She suddenly altered the manner of her speech. It was a strange proposition, perhaps, but this was one of the strangest of men.
“I am quite willing to try it,” she decided. “Will you tell me where I can meet you later on?”
“I have an hour and a half for luncheon at one o'clock,” he said. “Meet me exactly at the southeast corner of Trafalgar Square. Would you like a little money?” he added, rising.
“I have plenty, thank you,” she answered.
He laid half-a-crown upon the table and made an entry in a small memorandum book which he drew from his pocket.
“You had better keep this,” he said, “in case you want it. I am going to leave you alone here. You can find your way anywhere, I am sure, and I am in a hurry. At one o'clock, remember. I hope you will still be feeling better.”
He put on his hat and went away without a backward glance. Beatrice sat in her chair and watched him out of sight.
CHAPTER V. INTRODUCING Mrs. WENHAM GARDNER
A very distinguished client was engaging the attention of Mr. Dowling, Senior, of Messrs. Dowling, Spence & Company, auctioneers and estate agents, whose offices were situated in Waterloo Place, Pall Mall. Mr. Dowling was a fussy little man of between fifty and sixty years, who spent most of his time playing golf, and who, although he studiously contrived to ignore the fact, had long since lost touch with the details of his business. Consequently, in the absence of Mr. Dowling, Junior, who had developed a marked partiality for a certain bar in the locality, Tavernake was hastily summoned to the rescue from another part of the building, by a small boy violently out of breath.
“Never see the governor in such a fuss,” the latter declared, confidentially, “She's asking no end of questions and he don't know a thing.”
“Who is the lady?” Tavernake asked, on the way downstairs.
“Didn't hear her name,” the boy replied. “She's all right, though, I can tell you—a regular slap-up beauty. Such a motor-car, too! Flowers and tables and all sorts of things inside. By Jove, won't the governor tear his hair if she goes before you get there!”
Tavernake quickened his steps and in a few moments knocked at the door of the private office and entered.
His chief welcomed him with a gesture of relief. The distinguished client of the firm, whose attention he was endeavoring to engage, had glanced toward the newcomer, at his first appearance, with an air of somewhat bored unconcern. Her eyes, however, did not immediately leave his face. On the contrary, from the moment of his entrance she watched him steadfastly. Tavernake, stolid, unruffled, at that time without comprehension, approached the desk.
“This is—er—Mr. Tavernake, our manager,” Mr. Dowling announced, obsequiously. “In the absence of my son, he is in charge of the letting department. I have no doubt that he will be able to suggest something suitable. Tavernake,” he continued, “this lady,”—he glanced at a card in front of him—“Mrs. Wenham Gardner of New York, is looking for a town house, and has been kind enough to favor us with an inquiry.”
Tavernake made no immediate reply. Mr. Dowling was shortsighted, and in any case it would never have occurred to him to associate nervousness, or any form of emotion, with his responsible manager. The beautiful lady leaned back in her chair. Her lips were parted in a slight but very curious smile, her fingers supported her cheek, her eyelids were contracted as she looked into his face. Tavernake felt that their recognition was mutual. Once more he was back again in the tragic atmosphere of that chemist's shop, with Beatrice, half fainting, in his arms, the beautiful lady turned to stone. It was an odd tableau, that, so vividly imprinted upon his memory that it was there before him at this very moment. There was mystery in this woman's eyes, mystery and something else.
“I don't seem to have come across anything down here which—er—particularly attracts Mrs.—Mrs. Wenham Gardner,” Mr. Dowling went on, taking up a little sheaf of papers from the desk. “I thought, perhaps, that the Bryanston Square house might have suited, but it seems that it is too small, far too small. Mrs. Gardner is used to entertaining, and has explained to me that she has a great many friends always coming and going from the other side of the water. She requires, apparently, twelve bedrooms, besides servants' quarters.”
“Your list is scarcely up to date, sir,” Tavernake reminded him. “If the rent is of no particular object, there is Grantham House.”
Mr. Dowling's face was suddenly illuminated.
“Grantham House!” he exclaimed. “Precisely! Now I declare that it had absolutely slipped my memory for the moment—only for the moment, mind—that we have just had placed upon our books one of the most desirable mansions in the west end of London. A most valued client, too, one whom we are most anxious to oblige. Dear, dear me! It is very fortunate—very fortunate indeed that I happened to think of it, especially as it seems that no one had had the sense to place it upon my list. Tavernake, get the plans at once and show them to—er—to Mrs. Gardner.”
Tavernake crossed the room in silence, opened a drawer, and returned with a stiff roll of papers, which he spread carefully out in front of this unexpected client. She spoke then for the first time since he had entered the room. Her voice was low and marvelously sweet. There was very little of the American accent about it, but something in the intonation, especially toward the end of her sentences, was just a trifle un-English.
“Where is this Grantham House?” she inquired.
“Within a stone's throw of Grosvenor Square,” Tavernake answered, briskly. “It is really one of the most central spots in the west end. If you will allow me!”
For the next few minutes he was very fluent indeed. With pencil in hand, he explained the plans, dwelt on the advantages of the location, and from the very reserve of his praise created an impression that the house he was describing was the one absolutely perfect domicile in the whole of London.
“Can I look over the place?” she asked, when he had finished.
“By all means,” Mr. Dowling declared, “by all means. I was on the point of suggesting it. It will be by far the most satisfactory proceeding. You will not be disappointed, my dear madam, I can assure you.”
“I should like to do so, if I may, without delay,” she said.
“There is no opportunity like the present,” Mr. Dowling replied. “If you will permit me,” he added, rising, “it will give me the greatest pleasure to escort you personally. My engagements for the rest of the day happen to be unimportant. Tavernake, let me have the keys of the rooms that are locked up. The caretaker, of course, is there in possession.”
The beautiful visitor rose to her feet, and even that slight movement was accomplished with a grace unlike anything which Tavernake had ever seen before.
“I could not think of troubling you so far, Mr. Dowling,” she protested. “It is not in the least necessary for you to come yourself. Your manager can, perhaps, spare me a few minutes. He seems to be so thoroughly posted in all the details,” she added, apologetically, as she noticed the cloud on Mr. Dowling's brow.
“Just as you like, of course,” he declared. “Mr. Tavernake can go, by all means. Now I come to think of it, it certainly would be inconvenient for me to be away from the office for more than a few minutes. Mr. Tavernake has all the details at his fingers' ends, and I only hope, Mrs. Gardner, that he will be able to persuade you to take the house. Our client,” he added, with a bow, “would, I am sure, be delighted to hear that we had secured for him so distinguished a tenant.”
She smiled at him, a delightful mixture of graciousness and condescension.
“You are very good,” she answered. “The house sounds rather large for me but it depends so much upon circumstances. If you are ready, Mr.—”
“Tavernake,” he told her.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she continued, “my car is waiting outside and we might go on at once.”
He bowed and held open the door for her, an office which he performed a little awkwardly. Mr. Dowling himself escorted her out on to the pavement. Tavernake stopped behind to get his hat, and passing out a moment afterwards, would have seated himself in front beside the chauffeur but that she held the door of the car open and beckoned to him.
“Will you come inside, please?” she insisted. “There are one or two questions which I might ask you as we go along. Please direct the chauffeur.”
He obeyed without a word; the car glided off. As they swung round the first corner, she leaned forward from among the cushions of her seat and looked at him. Then Tavernake was conscious of new things. As though by inspiration, he knew that her visit to the office of Messrs. Dowling, Spence & Company had been no chance one.
She remembered him, remembered him as the companion of Beatrice during that strange, brief meeting. It was an incomprehensible world, this, into which he had wandered. The woman's face had lost her languid, gracious expression. There was something there almost akin to tragedy. Her fingers fell upon his arm and her touch was no light one. She was gripping him almost fiercely.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she said, “I have a memory for faces which seldom fails me. I have seen you before quite lately. You remember where, of course. Tell me the truth quickly, please.”
The words seemed to leap from her lips. Beautiful and young though she undoubtedly was, her intense seriousness had suddenly aged her face. Tavernake was bewildered. He, too, was conscious of a curious emotional disturbance.
“The truth? What truth do you mean?” he demanded.
“It was you whom I saw with Beatrice!”
“You saw me one night about three weeks ago,” he admitted slowly. “I was in a chemist's shop in the Strand. You were signing his book for a sleeping draught, I think.”
She shivered all over.
“Yes, yes!” she cried. “Of course, I remember all about it. The young lady who was with you—what was she doing there? Where is she now?”
“The young lady was my sister,” Tavernake answered stiffly.
Mrs. Wenham Gardner looked, for a moment, as though she would have struck him.
“You need not lie to me!” she exclaimed. “It is not worth while. Tell me where you met her, why you were with her at all in that intimate fashion, and where she is now!”
Tavernake realized at once that so far as this woman was concerned, the fable of his relationship with Beatrice was hopeless. She knew!
“Madam,” he replied, “I made the acquaintance of the young lady with whom I was that evening, at the boarding-house where we both lived.”
“What were you doing in the chemist's shop?” she demanded.
“The young lady had been ill,” he proceeded deliberately, wondering how much to tell. “She had been taken very ill indeed. She was just recovering when you entered.”
“Where is she now?” the woman asked eagerly. “Is she still at that boarding-house of which you spoke?”
“No,” he answered.
Her fingers gripped his arm once more.
“Why do you answer me always in monosyllables? Don't you understand that you must tell me everything that you know about her. You must tell me where I can find her, at once.”
Tavernake remained silent. The woman's voice had still that note of wonderful sweetness, but she had altogether lost her air of complete and aristocratic indifference. She was a very altered person now from the distinguished client who had first enlisted his services. For some reason or other, he knew that she was suffering from a terrible anxiety.
“I am not sure,” he said at last, “whether I can do as you ask.”
“What do you mean?” she exclaimed sharply.
“The young lady,” he continued, “seemed, on the occasion to which you have referred, to be particularly anxious to avoid recognition. She hurried out of the place without speaking to you, and she has avoided the subject ever since. I do not know what her motives may have been, but I think that I should like to ask her first before I tell you where she is to be found.”
Mrs. Wenham Gardner leaned towards him. It was certainly the first time that a woman in her apparent rank of life had looked upon Tavernake in such a manner. Her forehead was a little wrinkled, her lips were parted, her eyes were pathetically, delightfully eloquent.
“Mr. Tavernake, you must not—you must not refuse me,” she pleaded. “If you only knew the importance of it, you would not hesitate for a moment. This is no idle curiosity on my part. I have reasons, very serious reasons indeed, for wishing to discover that poor girl's whereabouts at once. There is a possible danger of which she must be warned. No one can do it except myself.”
“Are you her friend or her enemy?” Tavernake asked.
“Why do you ask such a question?” she demanded.
“I am only going by her expression when she saw you come into the chemist's shop,” Tavernake persisted doggedly.
“It is a cruel suggestion, that,” the woman cried. “I wish to be her friend, I am her friend. If I could only tell you everything, you would understand at once what a terrible situation, what a hideous quandary I am in.”
Once more Tavernake paused for a few moments. He was never a quick thinker and the situation was certainly an embarrassing one for him.
“Madam,” he replied at length, “I beg that you will tell me nothing. The young lady of whom you have spoken permits me to call myself her friend, and what she has not told me herself I do not wish to learn from others. I will tell her of this meeting with you, and if it is her desire, I will bring you her address myself within a few hours. I cannot do more than that.”
Her face was suddenly cold and hard.
“You mean that you will not!” she exclaimed angrily. “You are obstinate. I do not know how you dare to refuse what I ask.”
The car had come to a standstill. He stepped out on to the pavement.
“This is Grantham House, madam,” he announced. “Will you descend?”
He heard her draw a quick breath between her teeth and he caught a gleam in her eyes which made him feel vaguely uneasy. She was very angry indeed.
“I do not think that it is necessary for me to do so,” she said frigidly. “I do not like the look of the house at all. I do not believe that it will suit me.”
“At least, now that you are here,” he protested, “you will, if you please, go over it. I should like you to see the ballroom. The decorations are supposed to be quite exceptional.”
She hesitated for a moment and then, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, she yielded. There was a note in his tone not exactly insistent, and yet dominant, a note which she obeyed although secretly she wondered at herself for doing so. They passed inside the house and she followed him from room to room, leaving him to do all the talking. She seemed very little interested but every now and then she asked a languid question.
“I do not think that it is in the least likely to suit me,” she decided at last. “It is all very magnificent, of course, but I consider that the rent is exorbitant.”
Tavernake regarded her thoughtfully.
“I believe,” he said, “that our client might be disposed to consider some reduction, in the event of your seriously entertaining taking the house. If you like, I will see him on the subject. I feel sure that the amount I have mentioned could be reduced, if the other conditions were satisfactory.”
“There would be no harm in your doing so,” she assented. “How soon can you come and let me know?”
“I might be able to ring you up this evening; certainly to-morrow morning,” he answered.
She shook her head.
“I will not speak upon the telephone,” she declared. “I only allow it in my rooms under protest. You must come and tell me what your client says. When can you see him?”
“It is doubtful whether I shall be able to find him this evening,” he replied. “It would probably be to-morrow morning.”
“You might go and try at once,” she suggested.
He was a little surprised.
“You are really interested in the matter, then?” he inquired.
“Yes, yes,” she told him, “of course I am interested. I want you to come and see me directly you have heard. It is important. Supposing you are able to find your client to-night, shall you have seen the young lady before then?”
“I am afraid not,” he answered.
“You must try,” she begged, laying her fingers upon his shoulder. “Mr. Tavernake, do please try. You can't realize what all this anxiety means to me. I am not at all well and I am seriously worried about—about that young lady. I tell you that I must have an interview with her. It is not for my sake so much as hers. She must be warned.”
“Warned?” Tavernake repeated. “I really don't understand.”
“Of course you don't!” she exclaimed impatiently. “Why should you understand? I don't want to offend you, Mr. Tavernake,” she went on hurriedly. “I would like to treat you quite frankly. It really isn't your place to make difficulties like this. What is this young lady to you that you should presume to consider yourself her guardian?”
“She is a boarding-house acquaintance,” Tavernake confessed, “nothing more.”
“Then why did you tell me, only a moment ago, that she was your sister?” Mrs. Gardner demanded.
Tavernake threw open the door before which they had been standing.
“This,” he said, “is the famous dancing gallery. Lord Clumber is quite willing to allow the pictures to remain, and I may tell you that they are insured for over sixty thousand pounds. There is no finer dancing room than this in all London.”
Her eyes swept around it carelessly.
“I have no doubt,” she admitted coldly, “that it is very beautiful. I prefer to continue our discussion.”
“The dining-room,” he went on, “is almost as large. Lord Clumber tells us that he has frequently entertained eighty guests for dinner. The system of ventilation in this room is, as you see, entirely modern.”
She took him by the arm and led him to a seat at the further end of the apartment.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she said, making an obvious attempt to control her temper, “you seem like a very sensible young man, if you will allow me to say so, and I want to convince you that it is your duty to answer my questions. In the first place—don't be offended, will you?—but I cannot possibly see what interest you and that young lady can have in one another. You belong, to put it baldly, to altogether different social stations, and it is not easy to imagine what you could have in common.”
She paused, but Tavernake had nothing to say. His gift of silence amounted sometimes almost to genius. She leaned so close to him while she waited in vain for his reply, that the ermine about her neck brushed his cheek. The perfume of her clothes and hair, the pleading of her deep violet-blue eyes, all helped to keep him tongue-tied. Nothing of this sort had ever happened to him before. He did not in the least understand what it could possibly mean.
“I am speaking to you now, Mr. Tavernake,” she continued earnestly, “for your own good. When you tell the young lady, as you have promised to this evening, that you have seen me, and that I am very, very anxious to find out where she is, she will very likely go down on her knees and beg you to give me no information whatever about her. She will do her best to make you promise to keep us apart. And yet that is all because she does not understand. Believe me, it is better that you should tell me the truth. You cannot know her very well, Mr. Tavernake, but she is not very wise, that young lady. She is very obstinate, and she has some strange ideas. It is not well for her that she should be left in the world alone. You must see that for yourself, Mr. Tavernake.”
“She seems a very sensible young lady,” he declared slowly. “I should have thought that she would have been old enough to know for herself what she wanted and what was best for her.”
The woman at his side wrung her hands with a little gesture of despair.
“Oh, why can't I make you understand!” she exclaimed, the emotion once more quivering in her tone. “How can I—how can I possibly make you believe me? Listen. Something has happened of which she does not know—something terrible. It is absolutely necessary, in her own interests as well as mine, that I see her, and that very shortly.”
“I shall tell her exactly what you say,” Tavernake answered apparently unmoved. “Perhaps it would be as well now if we went on to view the sleeping apartments.”
“Never mind about the sleeping apartments!” she cried quickly. “You must do more than tell her. You can't believe that I want to bring harm upon any one. Do I look like it? Have I the appearance of a person of evil disposition? You can be that young lady's best friend, Mr. Tavernake, if you will. Take me to her now, this minute. Believe me, if you do that, you will never regret it as long as you live.”
Tavernake studied the pattern of the parquet floor for several moments. It was a difficult problem, this. Putting his own extraordinary sensations into the background, he was face to face with something which he did not comprehend, and he disliked the position intensely. After all, delay seemed safest.
“Madam,” he protested, “a few hours more or less can make but little difference.”
“That is for me to judge!” she exclaimed. “You say that because you do not understand. A few hours may make all the difference in the world.”
He shook his head.
“I will tell you exactly what is in my mind,” he said, deliberately. “The young lady was terrified when she saw you that night accidentally in the chemist's shop. She almost dragged me away, and although she was almost fainting when we reached the taxicab, her greatest and chief anxiety was that we should get away before you could follow us. I cannot forget this. Until I have received her permission, therefore, to disclose her whereabouts, we will, if you please, speak of something else.”
He rose to his feet and glancing around was just in time to see the change in the face of his companion. That eloquently pleading smile had died away from her lips, her teeth were clenched. She looked like a woman struggling hard to control some overwhelming passion. Without the smile her lips seemed hard, even cruel. There were evil things shining out of her eyes. Tavernake felt chilled, almost afraid.
“We will see the rest of the house,” she declared coldly.
They went on from room to room. Tavernake, recovering himself rapidly, master of his subject, was fluent and practical. The woman listened, with only a terse remark here and there. Once more they stood in the hall.
“Is there anything else you would like to see?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she replied, “but there is one thing more I have to say.”
He waited in stolid silence.
“Only a week ago,” she went on, looking him in the face, “I told a man who is what you call, I think, an inquiry agent, that I would give a hundred pounds if he could discover that young woman for me within twenty-four hours.”
Tavernake started, and the smile came back to the lips of Mrs. Wenham Gardner. After all, perhaps she had found the way!
“A hundred pounds is a great deal of money,” he said thoughtfully.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Not so very much,” she replied. “About a fortnight's rent of this house, Mr. Tavernake.”
“Is the offer still open?” he asked.
She looked into his eyes, and her face had once more the beautiful ingenuousness of a child.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she said, “the offer is still open. Get into the car with me and drive back to my rooms at the Milan Court, and I will give you a cheque for a hundred pounds at once. It will be very easily earned and you may just as well take it, for now I know where you are employed, I could have you followed day by day until I discover for myself what you are so foolishly concealing. Be reasonable, Mr. Tavernake.”
Tavernake stood quite still. His arms were folded, he was looking out of the hall window at the smoky vista of roofs and chimneys. From the soles of his ready-made boots to his ill-brushed hair, he was a commonplace young man. A hundred pounds was to him a vast sum of money. It represented a year's strenuous savings, perhaps more. The woman who watched him imagined that he was hesitating. Tavernake, however, had no such thought in his mind. He stood there instead, wondering what strange thing had come to him that the mention of a hundred pounds, delightful sum though it was, never tempted him for a single second. What this woman had said might be true. She would probably be able to discover the address easily enough without his help. Yet no such reflection seemed to make the least difference. From the days of his earliest boyhood, from the time when he had flung himself into the struggle, money had always meant much to him, money not for its own sake but as the key to those things which he coveted in life. Yet at that moment something stronger seemed to have asserted itself.
“You will come?” she whispered, passing her arm through his. “We will be there in less than five minutes, and I will write you the cheque before you tell me anything.”
He moved towards the door indeed, but he drew a little away from her.
“Madam,” he said, “I am sorry to seem so obstinate, but I thought I had made you understand some time ago. I do not feel at liberty to tell you anything without that young lady's permission.”
“You refuse?” she cried, incredulously. “You refuse a hundred pounds?”
He opened the door of the car. He seemed scarcely to have heard her.
“At about eleven o'clock to-morrow morning,” he announced, “I shall have the pleasure of calling upon you. I trust that you will have decided to take the house.”
CHAPTER VI. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Tavernake sat a few hours later at his evening meal in the tiny sitting-room of an apartment house in Chelsea. He wore a black tie, and although he had not yet aspired to a dinner coat, the details of his person and toilet showed signs of a new attention. Opposite to him was Beatrice.
“Tell me,” she asked, as soon as the small maid-servant who brought in their first dish had disappeared, “what have you been doing all day? Have you been letting houses or surveying land or book-keeping, or have you been out to Marston Rise?”
It was her customary question, this. She really took an interest in his work.
“I have been attending a rich American client,” he announced, “a compatriot of your own. I went with her to Grantham House in her own motor-car. I believe she thinks of taking it.”
“American!” Beatrice remarked. “What was her name?”
Tavernake looked up from his plate across the little table, across the bowl of simple flowers which was its sole decoration.
“She called herself Mrs. Wenham Garner!”
Away like a flash went the new-found peace in the girl's face. She caught at her breath, her fingers gripped the table in front of her. Once more she was as he had known her first—pale, with great terrified eyes shining out of a haggard face.
“She has been to you,” Beatrice gasped, “for a house? You are sure?”
“I am quite sure,” Tavernake declared, calmly.
“You recognized her?”
He assented gravely.
“It was the woman who stood in the chemist's shop that night, signing her name in a book,” he said.
He did not apologize in any way for the shock he had given her. He had done it deliberately. From that very first morning, when they had breakfasted together at London Bridge, he had felt that he deserved her confidence, and in a sense it was a grievance with him that she had withheld it.
“Did she recognize you?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I was sent for into the office and found her there with the chief. I felt sure that she recognized me from the first, and when she agreed to look at Grantham House, she insisted upon it that I should accompany her. While we were in the motor-car, she asked me about you. She wished for your address.”
“Did you give it to her?” the girl cried, breathlessly.
“No; I said that I must consult you first.”
She drew a little sigh of relief. Nevertheless, she was looking white and shaken.
“Did she say what she wanted me for?”
“She was very mysterious,” Tavernake answered. “She spoke of some danger of which you knew nothing. Before I came away, she offered me a hundred pounds to let her know where you were.”
Beatrice laughed softly.
“That is just like Elizabeth,” she declared. “You must have made her very angry. When she wants anything, she wants it very badly indeed, and she will never believe that every person has not his price. Money means everything to her. If she had it, she would buy, buy, buy all the time.”
“On the face of it,” Tavernake remarked, soberly, “her offer seemed rather an absurd one. If she is in earnest, if she is really so anxious to discover your whereabouts, she will certainly be able to do so without my help.”
“I am not so sure,” Beatrice replied. “London is a great hiding place.”
“A private detective,” he began,—
Beatrice shook her head.
“I do not think,” she said, “that Elizabeth will care to employ a private detective. Tell me, have you to see her upon this business again?”
“I am going to her flat at the Milan Court to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock.”
Beatrice leaned back in her chair. Presently she recommenced her dinner. She had the air of one to whom a respite has been granted. Tavernake, in a way, began to resent this continued silence of hers. He had certainly hoped that she would at least have gone so far as to explain her anxiety to keep her whereabouts secret.
“You must remember,” he went on, after a short pause, “that I am in a somewhat peculiar position with regard to you, Beatrice. I know so little that I do not even know how to answer in your interests such questions as Mrs. Wenham Gardner asked me. I am not complaining, but is this state of absolute ignorance necessary?”
A new thought seemed to come to Beatrice. She looked at her companion curiously.
“Tell me,” she asked, “what did you think of Mrs. Wenham Gardner?”
Tavernake answered deliberately, and after a moment's reflection.
“I thought her,” he said, “one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. That is not saying very much, perhaps, but to me it meant a good deal. She was exceedingly gracious and her interest in you seemed quite real and even affectionate. I do not understand why you should wish to hide from such a woman.”
“You found her attractive?” Beatrice persisted.
“I found her very attractive indeed,” Tavernake admitted, without hesitation. “She had an air with her. She was quite different from all the women I have ever met at the boarding-house or anywhere else. She has a face which reminded me somehow of the Madonnas you took me to see in the National Gallery the other day.”
Beatrice shivered slightly. For some reason, his remark seemed to have distressed her.
“I am very, very sorry,” she declared, “that Elizabeth ever came to your office. I want you to promise me, Leonard, that you will be careful whenever you are with her.”
Tavernake laughed.
“Careful!” he repeated. “She isn't likely to be even civil to me tomorrow when I tell her that I have seen you and I refuse to give her your address. Careful, indeed! What has a poor clerk in a house-agent's office to fear from such a personage?”
The servant had reappeared with their second and last course. For a few moments they spoke of casual subjects. Afterwards, however, Tavernake asked a question.
“By the way,” he said, “we are hoping to let Grantham House to Mrs. Wenham Gardner. I suppose she must be very wealthy?”
Beatrice looked at him curiously.
“Why do you come to me for information?” she demanded. “I suppose that she brought you references?”
“We haven't quite got to that stage yet,” he answered. “Somehow or other, from her manner of talking and general appearance, I do not think that either Mr. Dowling or I doubted her financial position.”
“I should never have thought you so credulous a person,” remarked Beatrice, with a smile.
Tavernake was genuinely disturbed. His business instincts were aroused.
“Do you really mean that this Mrs. Wenham Gardner is not a person of substance?” he inquired.
Beatrice shrugged her shoulders.
“She is the wife of a man who had the reputation of being very wealthy,” she replied. “She has no money of her own, I am sure.”
“She still lives with her husband, I suppose?” Tavernake asked.
Beatrice closed her eyes.
“I know very little about her,” she declared. “Last time I heard, he had disappeared, gone away, or something of the sort.”
“And she has no money,” Tavernake persisted, “except what she gets from him? No settlement, even, or anything of that sort?”
“Nothing at all,” Beatrice answered.
“This is very bad news,” Tavernake remarked, thinking gloomily of his wasted day. “It will be a great disappointment to Mr. Dowling. Why, her motor-car was magnificent, and she talked as though money were no object at all. I suppose you are quite sure of what you are saying?”
Beatrice shrugged her shoulders.
“I ought to know,” she answered, grimly, “for she is my sister.”
Tavernake remained quite motionless for a minute, without speech; it was his way of showing surprise. When he was sure that he had grasped the import of her words, he spoke again.
“Your sister!” he repeated. “There is a likeness, of course. You are dark and she is fair, but there is a likeness. That would account,” he continued, “for her anxiety to find you.”
“It also accounts,” Beatrice replied, with a little break of the lips, “for my anxiety that she should not find me. Leonard,” she added, touching his hand for a moment with hers, “I wish that I could tell you everything, but there are things behind, things so terrible, that even to you, my dear brother, I could not speak of them.”
Tavernake rose to his feet and lit a cigarette—a new habit with him, while Beatrice busied herself with a small coffee-making machine. He sat in an easy-chair and smoked slowly. He was still wearing his ready-made clothes, but his collar was of the fashionable shape, his tie well chosen and neatly adjusted. He seemed somehow to have developed.
“Beatrice,” he asked, “what am I to tell your sister to-morrow?”
She shivered as she set his coffee-cup down by his side.
“Tell her, if you will, that I am well and not in want,” she answered. “Tell her, too, that I refuse to send my address. Tell her that the one aim of my life is to keep the knowledge of my whereabouts a secret from her.”
Tavernake relapsed into silence. He was thinking. Mysteries had no attraction for him—he loathed them. Against this one especially he felt a distinct grudge. Nevertheless, some instinct forbade his questioning the girl.
“Apart from more personal matters, then,” he asked after some time, “you would not advise me to enter into any business negotiations with this lady?”
“You must not think of it,” Beatrice replied, firmly. “So far as money is concerned, Elizabeth has no conscience whatever. The things she wants in life she will have somehow, but it is all the time at other people's expense. Some day she will have to pay for it.”
Tavernake sighed.
“It is very unfortunate,” he declared. “The commission on the letting of Grantham House would have been worth having.”
“After all, it is only your firm's loss,” she reminded him.
“It does not appeal to me like that,” he continued. “So long as I am manager for Dowling & Spence, I feel these things personally. However, that does not matter. I am afraid it is a disagreeable subject for you, and we will not talk about it any longer.”
She lit a cigarette with a little gesture of relief. She came once more to his side.
“Leonard,” she said, “I know that I am treating you badly in telling you nothing, but it is simply because I do not want to descend to half truths. I should like to tell you all or nothing. At present I cannot tell you all.”
“Very well,” he replied, “I am quite content to leave it with you to do as you think best.”
“Leonard,” she continued, “of course you think me unreasonable. I can't help it. There are things between my sister and myself the knowledge of which is a constant nightmare to me. During the last few months of my life it has grown to be a perfect terror. It sent me into hiding at Blenheim House, it reconciled me even to the decision I came to that night on the Embankment. I had decided that sooner than go back, sooner than ask help from her or any one connected with her, I would do what I tried to do the time when you saved my life.”
Tavernake looked at her wonderingly. She was, indeed, under the spell of some deep emotion. Her memory seemed to have carried her back into another world, somewhere far away from this dingy little sitting-room which they two were sharing together, back into a world where life and death were matters of small moment, where the great passions were unchained, and men and women moved among the naked things of life. Almost he felt the thrill of it. It was something new to him, the touch of a magic finger upon his eyelids. Then the moment passed and he was himself again, matter-of-fact, prosaic.
“Let us dismiss the subject finally,” he said. “I must see your sister on business to-morrow, but it shall be for the last time.”
“I think,” she murmured, “that you will be wise.”
He crossed the room and returned with a newspaper.
“I saw your music in the hall as I came in,” he remarked. “Are you singing to-night?”
The question was entirely in his ordinary tone. It brought her back to the world of every-day things as nothing else could have done.
“Yes; isn't it luck?” she told him. “Three in one week. I only heard an hour ago.”
“A city dinner?” he inquired.
“Something of the sort,” she replied. “I am to be at the Whitehall Rooms at ten o'clock. If you are tired, Leonard, please let me go alone. I really do not mind. I can get a 'bus to the door, there and back again.”
“I am not tired,” he declared. “To tell you the truth, I scarcely know what it is to be tired. I shall go with you, of course.”
She looked at him with a momentary admiration of his powerful frame, his strong, forceful face.
“It seems too bad,” she remarked, “after a long day's work to drag you out again.”
He smiled.
“I really like to come,” he assured her. “Besides,” he added, after a moment's pause, “I like to hear you sing.”
“I wonder if you mean that?” she asked, looking at him curiously. “I have watched you once or twice when I have been singing to you. Do you really care for it?”
“Certainly I do. How can you doubt it? I do not,” he continued, slowly, “understand music, or anything of that sort, of course, any more than I do the pictures you take me to see, and some of the books you talk about. There are lots of things I can't get the hang of entirely, but they all leave a sort of pleasure behind. One feels it even if one only half appreciates.”
She came over to his chair.
“I am glad,” she said, a little wistfully, “that there is one thing I do which you like.”
He looked at her reprovingly.
“My dear Beatrice,” he said, “I often wish I could make you understand how extraordinarily helpful and useful to me you have been.”
“Tell me in what way?” she begged.
“You have given me,” he assured her, “an insight into many things in life which I had found most perplexing. You see, you have traveled and I haven't. You have mixed with all classes of people, and I have gone steadily on in one groove. You have told me many things which I shall find very useful indeed later on.”
“Dear me,” she laughed, “you are making me quite conceited!”
“Anyhow,” he replied, “I don't want you to look upon me, Beatrice, in any way as a benefactor. I am much more comfortable here than at the boarding-house and it is costing no more money, especially since you began to get those singing engagements. By the way, hadn't you better go and get ready?”
She smothered a sigh as she turned away and went slowly upstairs. To all appearance, no person who ever breathed was more ordinary than this strong-featured, self-centered young man who had put out his arm and snatched her from the Maelstrom. Yet it seemed to her that there was something almost unnatural about his unapproachability. She was convinced that he was entirely honest, not only with regard to his actual relations toward her, but with regard to all his purposes. Her sex did not even seem to exist for him. The fact that she was good-looking, and with her renewed health daily becoming more so, seemed to be of no account to him whatever. He showed interest in her appearance sometimes, but it was interest of an entirely impersonal sort. He simply expressed himself as satisfied or dissatisfied, as a matter of taste. It came to her at that moment that she had never seen him really relax. Only when he sat opposite to that great map which hung now in the further room, and wandered about from section to section with a pencil in one hand and a piece of rubber in another, did he show anything which in any way approached enthusiasm, and even then it was always the unmistakable enthusiasm born of dead things. Suddenly she laughed at herself in the little mirror, laughed softly but heartily. This was the guardian whom Fate had sent for her! If Elizabeth had only understood!
CHAPTER VII. Mr. PRITCHARD OF NEW YORK
Later in the evening, Beatrice and Tavernake traveled together in a motor omnibus from their rooms at Chelsea to Northumberland Avenue. Tavernake was getting quite used to the programme by now. They sat in a dimly-lit waiting-room until the time came for Beatrice to sing. Every now and then an excitable little person who was the secretary to some institution or other would run in and offer them refreshments, and tell them in what order they were to appear. To-night there was no departure from the ordinary course of things, except that there was slightly more stir. The dinner was a larger one than usual. It came to Beatrice's turn very soon after their arrival, and Tavernake, squeezing his way a few steps into the dining-room, stood with the waiters against the wall. He looked with curious eyes upon a scene with which he had no manner of sympathy.
A hundred or so of men had dined together in the cause of some charity. The odor of their dinner, mingled with the more aromatic perfume of the tobacco smoke which was already ascending in little blue clouds from the various tables, hung about the over-heated room, seeming, indeed, the fitting atmosphere for the long rows of guests. The majority of them were in a state of expansiveness. Their faces were redder than when they had sat down; a certain stiffness had departed from their shirt-fronts and their manners; their faces were flushed, their eyes watery. There were a few exceptions—paler-faced men who sat there with the air of endeavoring to bring themselves into accord with surroundings in which they had no real concern. Two of these looked up with interest at the first note of Beatrice's song. The one was sitting within a few places of the chairman, and he was too far away for his little start to be noticed by either Tavernake or Beatrice. The nearer one, however, Tavernake happened to be watching, and he saw the change in his expression. The man was, in his way, ugly. His face was certainly not a good one, although he did not appear to share the immediate weaknesses of his neighbors. To every note of the song he listened intently. When it was over, he rose and came toward Tavernake.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but did I not see you come in with the young lady who has just been singing?”
“You may have,” Tavernake answered. “I certainly did come with her.”
“May I ask if you are related to her?”
Tavernake had got over his hesitation in replying to such questions, by now. He answered promptly.
“I am her brother,” he declared.
The man produced a card.
“Please introduce me to her,” he begged, laconically.
“Why should I?” Tavernake asked. “I have no reason to suppose that she desires to know you.”
The man stared at him for a moment, and then laughed.
“Well,” he said, “you had better show your sister my card. She is, I presume, a professional, as she is singing here. My desire to make her acquaintance is purely actuated by business motives.”
Tavernake moved away toward the waiting-room.
The man, who according to his card was Mr. Sidney Grier, would have followed him in, but Tavernake stopped him.
“If you will wait here,” he suggested, “I will see whether my sister desires to meet you.”
Once more Mr. Sidney Grier looked surprised, but after a second glance at Tavernake he accepted his suggestion and remained outside. Tavernake took the card to Beatrice.
“Beatrice,” he announced, “there is a man outside who has heard you sing and who wants to be introduced.”
She took the card and her eyes opened wide.
“Do you know who he is?” Tavernake asked.
“Of course,” she answered. “He is a great producer of musical comedies. Let me think.”
She stood with the card in her hand. Some one else was singing now—an ordinary modern ballad of love and roses, rapture and despair. They heard the rising and falling of the woman's voice; the clatter of the dinner had ceased. Beatrice stood still thinking, her fingers clinching the card of Mr. Sidney Grier.
“You must bring him in,” she said to Tavernake finally.
Tavernake went outside.
“My sister will see you,” he remarked, with the air of one who brings good news.
Mr. Sidney Grier grunted. He was not used to being kept waiting, even for a second. Tavernake ushered him into the retiring room, and the other two musicians who were there stared at him as at a god.
“This is the gentleman whose card you have, Beatrice,” Tavernake announced. “Mr. Sidney Grier—Miss Tavernake!”
The man smiled.
“Your brother seems to be suspicious of me,” he declared. “I found it quite difficult to persuade him that you might find it interesting to talk to me for a few minutes.”
“He does not quite understand,” Beatrice answered. “He has not much experience of musical affairs or the stage, and your name would not have any significance for him.”
Tavernake went outside and listened idly to the song which was proceeding. It was a class of music which secretly he preferred to the stranger and more haunting notes of Beatrice's melodies. Apparently the audience was of his opinion, for they received it with a vociferous encore, to which the young lady generously replied with a music-hall song about “A French lady from over the water.” Towards the close of the applause which marked the conclusion of this effort, Tavernake felt himself touched lightly upon the arm. He turned round. By his side was standing the other dinner guest who had shown some interest in Beatrice. He was a man apparently of about forty years of age, tall and broad-shouldered, with black moustache, and dark, piercing eyes. Unlike most of the guests, he wore a short dinner-coat and black tie, from which, and his slight accent, Tavernake concluded that he was probably an American.
“Say, you'll forgive my speaking to you,” he said, touching Tavernake on the arm. “My name is Pritchard. I saw you come in with the young lady who was singing a few minutes ago, and if you won't consider it a liberty, I'll be very glad indeed if you'll answer me one question.”
Tavernake stiffened insensibly.
“It depends upon the question,” he replied, shortly.
“Well, it's about the young lady, and that's a fact,” Mr. Pritchard admitted. “I see that her name upon the programme is given as Miss Tavernake. I was seated at the other end of the room but she seemed to me remarkably like a young lady from the other side of the Atlantic, whom I am very anxious to meet.”
“Perhaps you will kindly put your question in plain words,” Tavernake said.
“Why, that's easy,” Mr. Pritchard declared. “Is Miss Tavernake really her name, or an assumed one? I expect it's the same over here as in my country—a singer very often sings under another name than her own, you know,” he added, noting Tavernake's gathering frown.
“The young lady in question is my sister, and I do not care to discuss her with strangers,” Tavernake announced.
Mr. Pritchard nodded pleasantly.
“Why, of course, that ends the matter,” he remarked. “Sorry to have troubled you, anyway.”
He strolled off back to his seat and Tavernake returned thoughtfully to the dressing-room. He found Beatrice alone and waiting for him.
“You've got rid of that fellow, then?” he inquired.
Beatrice assented.
“Yes; he didn't stay very long,” she replied.
“Who was he?” Tavernake asked, curiously.
“From a musical comedy point of view,” she said, “he was the most important person in London. He is the emperor of stage-land. He can make the fortune of any girl in London who is reasonably good-looking and who can sing and dance ever so little.”
“What did he want with you?” Tavernake demanded, suspiciously.
“He asked me whether I would like to go upon the stage. What do you think about it, Leonard?”
Tavernake, for some reason or other, was displeased.
“Would you earn much more money than by singing at these dinners?” he asked.
“Very, very much more,” she assured him.
“And you would like the life?”
She laughed softly.
“Why not? It isn't so bad. I was on the stage in New York for some time under much worse conditions.”
He remained silent for a few minutes. They had made their way into the street now and were waiting for an omnibus.
“What did you tell him?” he asked, abruptly.
She was looking down toward the Embankment, her eyes filled once more with the things which he could not understand.
“I have told him nothing yet,” she murmured.
“You would like to accept?”
She nodded.
“I am not sure,” she replied. “If only—I dared!”
CHAPTER VIII. WOMAN'S WILES
At eleven o'clock the next morning, Tavernake presented himself at the Milan Court and inquired for Mrs. Wenham Gardner. He was sent at once to her apartments in charge of a page. She was lying upon a sofa piled up with cushions, wrapped in a wonderful blue garment which seemed somehow to deepen the color of her eyes. By her side was a small table on which was some chocolate, a bowl of roses, and a roll of newspapers. She held out her hand toward Tavernake, but did not rise. There was something almost spiritual about her pallor, the delicate outline of her figure, so imperfectly concealed by the thin silk dressing-gown, the faint, tired smile with which she welcomed him.
“You will forgive my receiving you like this, Mr. Tavernake?” she begged. “To-day I have a headache. I have been anxious for your coming. You must sit by my side, please, and tell me at once whether you have seen Beatrice.”
Tavernake did exactly as he was bidden. The chair toward which she had pointed was quite close to the sofa, but there was no other unoccupied in the room. She raised herself a little on the couch and turned towards him. Her eyes were fixed anxiously upon his, her forehead slightly wrinkled, her voice tremulous with eagerness.
“You have seen her?”
“I have,” he admitted, looking steadily into the lining of his hat.
“She has been cruel,” Elizabeth declared. “I can tell it from your face. You have bad news for me.”
“I do not know,” Tavernake replied, “whether she has been cruel or not. She refuses to allow me to tell you her address. She begged me, indeed, to keep away from you altogether.”
“Why? Did she tell you why?”
“She says that you are her sister, that you have no money of your own and that your husband has left you,” Tavernake answered, deliberately.
“Is that all?”
“No, it is not all,” he continued. “As to the rest, she told me nothing definite. It is quite clear, however, that she is very anxious to keep away from you.”
“But her reason?” Elizabeth persisted. “Did she give you no reason?”
Tavernake looked her in the face.
“She gave me no reason,” he said.
“Do you believe that she is justified in treating me like this?” Elizabeth asked, playing nervously with a pendant which hung from her smooth, bare neck.
“Of course I do,” he replied. “I am quite sure that she would not feel as she does unless you had been guilty of something very terrible indeed.”
The woman on the couch winced as though some one had struck her. A more susceptible man than Tavernake must have felt a little remorseful at the tears which dimmed for a moment her beautiful eyes. Tavernake, however, although he felt a moment's uneasiness, although he felt himself assailed all the time by a curious new emotion which he utterly failed to understand, was nevertheless still immune. The things which were to happen to him had not yet, arrived.
“Of course,” he continued, “I was very much disappointed to hear this, because I had hoped that we might have been able to let Grantham House to you. We cannot consider the matter at all now unless you pay for everything in advance.”
She uncovered her eyes and looked at him. People so direct of speech as this had come very seldom into her life. She was conscious of a thrill of interest. The study of men was a passion with her. Here was indeed a new type!
“So you think that I am an adventuress,” she murmured.
He reflected for a moment.
“I suppose,” he admitted, “that it comes to that. I should not have returned at all if I had not promised. If there is any message which you wish me to give your sister, I will take it, but I cannot tell you her address.”
She laid her hand suddenly upon his, and raising herself a little on the couch, leaned towards him. Her eyes and her lips both pleaded with him.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she said slowly, “Beatrice is such a dear, obstinate creature, but she does not quite appreciate my position. Do me a favor, please. If you have promised not to give me her address let me at least know some way or some place in which I could come across her. I am sure she will be glad afterwards, and I—I shall be very grateful.”
Tavernake felt that he was enveloped by something which he did not understand, but his lack of experience was so great that he did not even wonder at his insensibility.
“I shall keep my word to your sister,” he announced, “in the spirit as well as the letter. It is quite useless to ask me to do otherwise.”
Elizabeth was at first amazed, then angry, how angry she scarcely knew even herself. She had been a spoilt child, she had grown into a spoilt woman. Men, at least, had been ready enough to do her bidding all her life. Her beauty was of that peculiar kind, half seductive, half pathetic, wholly irresistible. And now there had come this strange, almost impossible person, against the armor of whose indifference she had spent herself in vain. Her eyes filled with tears once more as she looked at him, and Tavernake became uneasy. He glanced at the clock and again toward the door.
“I think, if you will excuse me,” he began,—
“Mr. Tavernake,” she interrupted, “you are very unkind to me, very unkind indeed.”
“I cannot help it,” he answered.
“If you knew everything,” she continued, “you would not be so obstinate. If Beatrice herself were here, if I could whisper something in her ear, she would be only too thankful that I had found her out. Beatrice has always misunderstood me, Mr. Tavernake. It is a little hard upon me, for we are both so far away from home, from our friends.”
“You can send her any message you like by me,” Tavernake declared. “If you like, I will wait while you write a letter. If you really have anything to say to her which might change her opinion, you can write it, can't you?”
She looked down at her hands—very beautiful and well-kept hands—and sighed. This young man, with his unusual imperturbability and hateful common sense, was getting on her nerves.
“It is so hard to write things, Mr. Tavernake,” she said, “but, of course, it is something to know that if the worst happens I can send her a letter. I shall think about that for a short time. Meanwhile, there is so much about her I would love to have you tell me. She has no money, has she? How does she support herself?”
“She sings occasionally at concerts,” Tavernake replied after a moment's pause. “I suppose there is no harm in telling you that.”
Elizabeth leaned towards him. She was very loth indeed to acknowledge defeat. Once more her voice was deliciously soft, her forehead delicately wrinkled, her blue eyes filled with alluring light.
“Mr. Tavernake,” she murmured, “do you know that you are not in the least kind to me? Beatrice and I are sisters, after all. Even she has admitted that. She left me most unkindly at a critical time in my life; she misunderstood things; if I were to see her, I could explain everything. I feel it very much that she is living apart from me in this city where we are both strangers. I am anxious about her, Mr. Tavernake. Does she want money? If so, will you take her some from me? Can't you suggest any way in which I could help her? Do be my friend, please, and advise me.”
Life was certainly opening out for Tavernake. The atmosphere by which he was surrounded, which she was deliberately creating around him, was the atmosphere of an unknown world. It was a position, this, entirely novel to him. Nevertheless, he did his best to cope with it intelligently. He reflected carefully before he made any reply, he refused absolutely to listen to the strange voices singing in his ears, and he delivered his decision with his usual air of finality.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that since Beatrice refuses even to let you know her whereabouts, she would not wish to accept anything from you. It seems a pity,” he went on, the instincts of the money-saver stirring within him; “she is certainly none too well off.”
The lady on the couch sighed.
“Beatrice has at least a friend,” she murmured. “It is a great deal to have a friend. It is more than I have. We are both so far from home here. Often I am sorry that we ever left America. England is not a hospitable country, Mr. Tavernake.”
Again this painfully literal young man spoke out what was in his mind.
“There was a gentleman in the motor-car with you the other night,” he reminded her.
She bit her lip.
“He was just an acquaintance,” she answered, “a man whom I used to know in New York, passing through London. He called on me and asked me to go to the theatre and supper. Why not? I have had a terrible time during the last few months, Mr. Tavernake, and I am very lonely—lonelier than ever since my sister deserted me.”
Tavernake began to feel, ridiculous though it seemed, that in some subtle and inexplicable fashion he was in danger. At any rate, he was hopelessly bewildered. He did not understand why this very beautiful lady should look at him as though they were old friends, why her eyes should appeal to him so often for sympathy, why her fingers, which a moment ago were resting lightly upon his hand, and which she had drawn away with reluctance, should have burned him like pin-pricks of fire. The woman who wishes to allure may be as subtle as possible in her methods, but a sense of her purpose, however vague it may be, is generally communicated to her would be victim. Tavernake was becoming distinctly uneasy. He had no vanity. He knew from the first that this beautiful creature belonged to a world far removed from any of which he had any knowledge. The only solution of the situation which presented itself to him was that she might be thinking of borrowing money from him!
“There was never a time in my life,” she continued softly, “when I felt that I needed a friend more. I am afraid that my sister has prejudiced you against me, Mr. Tavernake. Beatrice is very young, and the young are not always sympathetic, you know. They do not make allowances, they do not understand.”
“Why did you tell Mr. Dowling things which were not true?” he asked bluntly.
She sighed, and looked down at the handkerchief with which she had been toying.
“It was a very silly piece of conceit,” she admitted, “but, you see, I had to tell him something.”
“Why did you come to the office at all?” he continued.
“Do you really want to know that?” she whispered softly.
“Well,—”
“I will tell you,” she went on suddenly. “It sounds foolish, in a way, and yet it wasn't really, because, you see,”—she smiled at him—“I was anxious about Beatrice. I saw you come out of the office that morning, and I recognized you at once. I knew that it was you who had been with Beatrice. I made an excuse about the house to come and see whether I could find you out.”
Tavernake, in whom the vanity was not yet born, missed wholly the significance of her smile, her trifling hesitation.
“All that,” he declared, “is no reason why you should have told Mr. Dowling that your husband was a millionaire and had given you carte blanche about taking a house.”
“Did I mention—my husband?”
“Distinctly,” he assured her.
For the first time she had faltered in her speech. Tavernake felt that she herself was shaken by some emotion. Her eyes for a moment were strangely-lit; something had come into her face which he did not understand. Then it passed. The delightful smile, half deprecating, half appealing, once more parted her lips; the gleam of horror no longer shone in her blue eyes.
“I am always so foolish about money,” she declared, “so ignorant that I never know how I stand, but really I think that I have plenty, and a hundred or two more or less for rent didn't seem to matter much.”
It was a point of view, this, which Tavernake utterly failed to comprehend. He looked at her in surprise.
“I suppose,” he protested, “you know how much a year you have to live on?”
She shook her head.
“It seems to vary all the time,” she sighed. “There are so many complications.”
He looked at her in amazement.
“After all,” he admitted, “you don't look as though you had much of a head for figures.”
“If only I had some one to help me!” she murmured.
Tavernake moved uneasily in his chair. His sense of danger was growing.
“If you will excuse me now,” he said, “I think that I must be getting back. I am an employee at Dowling, Spence & Company's, you know, and my time is not quite my own. I only came because I promised to.”
“Mr. Tavernake,” she begged, looking at him full out of those wonderful blue eyes, “please do me a great favor.”
“What is it?” he asked with clumsy ungraciousness.
“Come and see me, every now and then, and let me know how my sister is. Perhaps you may be able to suggest some way in which I can help her.”
Tavernake considered the question for a moment. He was angry with himself for the unaccountable sense of pleasure which her suggestion had given him.
“I am not quite sure,” he said, “whether I had better come. Beatrice seemed quite anxious that I should not talk about her to you at all. She did not like my coming to-day.”
“You seem to know a great deal about my sister,” Elizabeth declared reflectively. “You call her by her Christian name and you appear to see her frequently. Perhaps, even, you are fond of her.”
Tavernake met his questioner's inquiring gaze blankly. He was almost indignant.
“Fond of her!” he exclaimed. “I have never been fond of any one in my life, or anything—except my work,” he added.
She looked at him a little bewildered at first.
“Oh, you strange person!” she cried, her lips breaking into a delightful smile. “Don't you know that you haven't begun to live at all yet? You don't even know anything about life, and at the back of it all you have capacity. Yes,” she went on, “I think that you have the capacity for living.”
Her hand fell upon his with a little gesture which was half a caress. He looked around him as though seeking for escape. He was on his feet now and he clutched at his hat.
“I must go,” he insisted almost roughly.
“Am I keeping you?” she asked innocently. “Well, you shall go as soon as you please, only you must promise me one thing. You must come back, say within a week, and let me know how my sister is. I am not half so brutal as you think. I really am anxious about her. Please!”
“I will promise that,” he answered.
“Wait one moment, then,” she begged, turning to the letters by her side. “There is just something I want to ask you. Don't be impatient—it is entirely a matter of business.”
All the time he was acutely conscious of that restless desire to get out of the room. The woman's white arms, from which the sleeves of her blue gown had fallen back, were stretched towards him as she lazily turned over her pile of correspondence. They were very beautiful arms and Tavernake, although he had had no experience, was dimly aware of the fact. Her eyes, too, seemed always to be trying to reach some part of him which was dead, or as yet unborn. He could feel her striving to get there, beating against the walls of his indifference. Why should a woman wear blue stockings because she had a blue gown, he wondered idly. She was not like Beatrice, this alluring, beautiful woman, who lay there talking to him in a manner whose meaning came to him only in strange, bewildering flashes. He could be with Beatrice and feel the truth of what he had once told her—that her sex was a thing which need not even be taken into account between them. With this woman it was different; he felt that she wished it to be different.
“Perhaps you had better tell me about that matter of business next time I am here,” he suggested, with an abruptness which was almost brusque. “I must go now. I do not know why I have stayed so long.”
She held out her fingers.
“You are a very sudden person,” she declared, smiling at his discomfiture. “If you must go!”
He scarcely touched her hand, anxious only to get away. And then the door opened and a man of somewhat remarkable appearance entered the room with the air of a privileged person. He was oddly dressed, with little regard to the fashion of the moment. His black coat was cut after the mode of a past generation, his collar was of the type affected by Gladstone and his fellow-statesmen, his black bow was arranged with studied negligence and he showed more frilled white shirt-front than is usual in the daytime. His silk hat was glossy but broad-brimmed; his masses of gray hair, brushed back from a high, broad forehead, gave him almost a patriarchal aspect. His features were large and fairly well-shaped, but his mouth was weak and his cheeks lacked the color of a healthy life. Tavernake stared at him open-mouthed. He, for his part, looked at Tavernake as he might have looked at some strange wild animal.
“A thousand apologies, dear Elizabeth!” he exclaimed. “I knocked, but I imagine that you did not hear me. Knowing your habits, it did not occur to me that you might be engaged at this hour of the morning.”
“It is a young man from the house agent's,” she announced indifferently, “come to see me about a flat.”
“In that case,” he suggested amiably, “I am, perhaps, not in the way.”
Elizabeth turned her head slightly and looked at him; he backed precipitately toward the door.
“In a few minutes,” he said. “I will return in a few minutes.”
Tavernake attempted to follow his example.
“There is no occasion for your friend to leave,” he protested. “If you have any instructions for us, a note to the office will always bring some one here to see you.”
She sat up on the couch and smiled at him. His obvious embarrassment amused her. It was a new sort of game, this, altogether.
“Come, Mr. Tavernake,” she said, “three minutes more won't matter, will it? I will not keep you longer than that, I promise.”
He came reluctantly a few steps back.
“I am sorry,” he explained, “but we really are busy this morning.”
“This is business,” she declared, still smiling at him pleasantly. “My sister has filled you with suspicions about me. Some of them may be justifiable, some are not. I am not so rich as I should like some people to believe. It is so much easier to live well, you know, when people believe that you are rolling in money. Still, I am by no means a pauper. I cannot afford to take Grantham House, but neither can I afford to go on living here. I have decided to make a change, to try and economize, to try and live within my means. Now will you bring me a list of small houses or flats, something at not more than say two or three hundred a year? It shall be strictly a business proceeding. I will pay you for your time, if that is necessary, and your commission in advance. There, you can't refuse my offer on those terms, can you?”
Tavernake remained silent. He was conscious that his lack of response seemed both sullen and awkward, but he was for the moment tongue-tied. His habit of inopportune self-analysis had once more asserted itself. He could not understand the curious nature of his mistrust of this woman, nor could he understand the pleasure which her suggestion gave him. He wanted to refuse, and yet he was glad to be able to tell himself that he was, after all, but an employee of his firm and not in a position to decline business on their behalf.
She leaned a little towards him; her tone was almost beseeching.
“You are not going to be unkind? You will not refuse me?” she pleaded.
“I will bring you a list,” he answered heavily, “on the terms you suggest.”
“To-morrow morning?” she begged.
“As soon as I am able,” he promised.
Then he escaped. Outside in the corridor, the man who had interrupted his interview was walking backwards and forwards. Tavernake passed him without responding to his bland greeting. He forgot all about the lift and descended five flights of stairs....
A few minutes later, he presented himself at the office and reported that Mrs. Wenham Gardner had decided unfavorably about Grantham House, and that she was not disposed, indeed, to take premises of anything like such a rental. Mr. Dowling was disappointed, and inclined to think that his employee had mismanaged the affair.
“I wish that I had gone myself,” he declared. “She obviously wished me to, but it happened to be inconvenient. By-the-bye, Tavernake, close the door, will you? There is another matter concerning which I should like to speak to you.”
Tavernake did as he was bidden at once, without any disquietude. His own services to the firm were of such a nature that he had no misgiving whatever as to his employer's desire for a private interview.
“It is about the Marston Rise estate,” Mr. Dowling explained, arranging his pince nez. “I believe that the time is coming when some sort of overtures should be made. You know what has been in my mind for a very considerable time.”
Tavernake nodded.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I know quite well.”
“I did hear a rumor,” Mr. Dowling continued, “that some one had bought one small plot on the outskirts of the estate. I dare say it is not true, and in any case it is not worth while troubling about, but it shows that the public is beginning to nibble. I am of opinion that the time is almost—yes, almost ripe for a move.”
“Do you wish me to do anything in the matter, sir?” Tavernake asked.
“In the first place,” Mr. Dowling declared, “I should like you to try to find out whether any of the plots have really been sold, and, if so, to whom, and what would be their price. Can you do this during the week?”
“I think so,” Tavernake answered.
“Say Monday morning,” Mr. Dowling suggested, taking down his hat. “I shall be playing golf to-morrow and Friday, and of course Saturday. Monday morning you might let me have a report.”
Tavernake went back to his office. After all, then, things were to come to a crisis a little earlier than he had thought. He knew quite well that that report, if he made it honestly, and no other idea was likely to occur to him, would effectually sever his connection with Messrs. Dowling, Spence & Company.
CHAPTER IX. THE PLOT THICKENS
The man whom Tavernake had left walking up and down the corridor lost no time in presenting himself once more at the apartments of Mrs. Wenham Gardner. He entered the suite without ceremony, carefully closing both doors behind him. It became obvious then that his deportment on the occasion of his previous appearance had been in the nature of a bluff. The air with which he looked across the room at the woman who watched him was furtive; the hand which laid his hat upon the table was shaking; there was a gleam almost of terror in his eyes. The woman remained impassive, inscrutable, simply watching him. After a moment or two, however, she spoke—a single monosyllable.
“Well?”
The man broke down.
“Elizabeth,” he exclaimed, “you are too—too ghastly! I can't stand it. You are unnatural.”
She stretched herself upon the couch and turned towards him.
“Unnatural, am I?” she remarked. “And what are you?”
He sank into a chair. He had become very flabby indeed.
“What you are always calling me, I suppose,” he muttered,—“a coward. You have so little consideration, Elizabeth. My health isn't what it was.”
His eyes had wandered longingly toward the cupboard at the further end of the apartment. The woman upon the couch smiled.
“You may help yourself,” she directed carelessly. “Perhaps then you will be able to tell me why you have come in such a state.”
He crossed the room in a few hasty steps, his head and shoulders disappeared inside the cupboard. There was the sound of the withdrawal of a cork, the fizz of a sodawater syphon. He returned to his place a different man.
“You must remember my age, Elizabeth dear,” he said, apologetically. “I haven't your nerve—it isn't likely that I should have. When I was twenty-five, there was nothing in the world of which I was afraid.”
She looked him over critically.
“Perhaps I am not so absolutely courageous as you think,” she remarked. “To tell you the truth, there are a good many things of which I am afraid when you come to me in such a state. I am afraid of you, of what you will do or say.”
“You need not be,” he assured her hastily. “When I am away from you, I am dumb. What I suffer no one knows. I keep it to myself.”
She nodded, a little contemptuously.
“I suppose you do your best,” she declared. “Tell me, now, what is this fresh thing which has disturbed you?”
Her visitor stared at her.
“Does there need to be any fresh thing?” he muttered.
“I suppose it is something about Wenham?” she asked.
The man shivered. He opened his lips and closed them again. The woman's tone, if possible, grew colder.
“I hope you are not going to tell me that you have disobeyed my orders,” she said.
“No,” he protested, “no! I was there yesterday. I came back by the mail from Penzance. I had to motor thirty miles to catch it.”
“Something has happened, of course,” she went on, “something which you are afraid to tell 'me. Sit up like a man, my dear father, and let me have the truth.”
“Nothing fresh has happened at all,” he assured her. “It is simply that the memory of the day I spent at that place and that the sight of him has got on my nerves till I can't sleep or think of anything else.”
“What rubbish!” she exclaimed.
“You have only seen the place in fine weather,” he continued, dropping his voice a little. “Elizabeth, you have no idea what it is really like. Yesterday morning I got out of the train at Bodmin and I motored through to the village of Clawes. After that there were five miles to walk. There's no road, only a sort of broken track, and for the whole of that five miles there isn't even a farm building to be seen and I didn't meet a human soul. There was a sort of pall of white-gray mists everywhere over the moor, sometimes so dense that I couldn't see my way, and you could stop and listen and there wasn't a thing to be heard, not even a sheep bell.”
She laughed softly..
“My dear, foolish father,” she murmured, “you don't understand what a rest cure is. This is quite all right, quite as it should be. Poor Wenham has been seeing too many people all his life—that is why we have to keep him quiet for a time. You can skip the scenery. I suppose you got to the house at last?”
“Yes, I got there,” continued her father. “You know what a bleak-looking place it is, right on the side of a bare hill—a square, gray stone place just the color of the hillside. Well, I got there and walked in. There was Ted Mathers, half dressed, no collar, with a bottle of whiskey on the table, playing some wretched game of cards by himself. Elizabeth, what a brute that man is!”
She shook her head.
“Go on,” she said. “What about Wenham?”
“He was there in a corner, gazing out of the window. When I came he sprang up, but when he saw who it was, he—he tried to hide. He was afraid of me.”
“Why?” she asked.
“He said that I—I reminded him of you.”
“Absurd!” she murmured. “Tell me, how did he look?”
“Ill, wretched, paler and thinner than ever, and wilder looking.”
“What did Mathers say about him?” she demanded.
“What could he? He told me that he cried all day and begged to be taken back to America.”
“No one goes near the place, I suppose?” she asked.
“Not a soul. A man comes from the village to sell things once a week. Mathers knows when to expect him and takes care that Wenham is not around. They are out of the world there—no road, no paths, nothing to bring even a tourist. I could have imagined such a spot in Arizona, Elizabeth, but in England—no!”
“Has he any amusements at all?” she inquired.
The man's hands were shaking; once more his eyes went longingly toward the cupboard.
“He has made—a doll,” he said, “carved it out of a piece of wood and dressed it in oddments from his ties. Mathers showed it to me as a joke. Elizabeth, it was wonderful—horrible!”
“Why?” she asked him.
“It is you,” he continued, moistening his lips with his tongue, “you, in a blue gown—your favorite shade. He has even made blue stockings and strange little shoes. He has got some hair from somewhere and parted it just like yours.”
“It sounds very touching,” she remarked.
The man was shivering again.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “I do not think that he means it kindly. Mathers took me up into his room. He has made something there which looks like a scaffold. The doll was hanging by a piece of string from the gallows. Elizabeth!—my God, but it was like you!” he cried, suddenly dropping his head upon his arms.
For a moment, a reflection of the terror which had seized him flashed in her own face. It passed quickly away. She laughed mockingly.
“My dear father,” she protested, “you are certainly not yourself this morning.”
“I saw you swinging,” he muttered, “swinging by that piece of cord! There was a great black pin through your heart. Elizabeth, if he should get away sometime! If some one should come over from America and discover where he was! If he should find us out! Oh, my God, if he should find us out!”
Elizabeth had risen to her feet. She was standing now before the fire, her left elbow resting upon the mantelpiece, a trifle of silver gleaming in her right hand.
“Father,” she said, “there is no danger in life for those who know no fear. Look at me.”
His eyes sought hers, fascinated.
“If he should find me out,” she continued, “it would be no such terrible thing, after all. It would be the end.”
Her fingers disclosed the little ornament she was carrying—a tiny pistol. She slipped it back into her pocket. The man was wondering how such a thing as this came to be his daughter.
“You have courage, Elizabeth,” he whispered.
“I have courage,” she assented, “because I have brains. I never allow myself to be in a position where I should be likely to get the worst of it. Ever since the day when he turned so suddenly against me, I have been careful.”
Her father leaned towards her.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “I never really understood. What was it that came over him so suddenly? One day he was your slave, the next I think he would have murdered you if he could.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Honestly,” she replied, “I felt it impossible to keep up the sham any longer. I married Wenham Gardner in New York because he was supposed to be a millionaire and because it seemed to be the best thing to do, but as to living with him, I never meant that. You know how ridiculous his behavior was on the boat. He never let me out of his sight, but swore that he was going to give up smoking and drinking and lead a new life for my sake. I really believe he meant it, too.”
“Wouldn't it have been better, dear,” her father suggested, timidly, “to have encouraged him?”
She shook her head.
“He was absolutely hopeless,” she declared. “You say that I have no nerves; that is because I do not allow myself to suffer. If I had gone on living with Wenham, it would have driven me mad. His habits, his manner of life, everything disgusted me. Until I came to see so much of him, I never understood what the term 'decadent' really can mean. The very touch of him grew to be hateful. No woman could live with such a man. By the way, he signed the draft, I suppose?”
Her father handed her a slip of paper, which she looked at and locked in her drawer.
“Did he make any trouble about it?” she asked.
The professor shivered.
“He refused to sign it,” he said, in a low tone, “swore he would never sign it. Mathers sent me out for a few minutes, made me go into another room. When I came back, he gave me the draft. I heard him calling out.”
“Mathers certainly earns his money,” she remarked, drily.
He gazed at her with grudging admiration. This was his daughter, his own flesh and blood. Back through the years, for a moment, he seemed to see her, a child with hair down her back, sitting on his knee, listening to his stories, wondering at the little arts and tricks by which he had wrested their pennies and sixpennies from a credulous public. Phrenologist, hypnotist, conjurer—all these things the great Professor Franklin had called himself. Often, from the rude stage where he had given his performance, he had terrified to death the women and children of his audience. It flashed upon him at that moment that never, even in the days of her childhood, had he seen fear in Elizabeth's face.
“You should have been a man, Elizabeth,” he muttered.
She shook her head, smiling as though not ill-pleased at the compliment.
“The power of a man is so limited,” she declared. “A woman has more weapons.”
“More weapons indeed,” the professor agreed, as his eyes traveled over the slim yet wonderful perfection of her form, lingered for a moment at the little knot of lace at her throat, wrestled with the delicate sweetness of her features, struggling hard to think from whom among his ancestors could have come a creature so physically attractive.
“More weapons, indeed,” he repeated. “Elizabeth, what a gift—what a gift!”
“You speak,” she replied, “as though it were an evil one.”
“I was only thinking,” he said, “that it seems a pity. You are so wonderful, we might have found an easier and a less dangerous way to fortune.”
She smiled.
“The Bohemian blood in me, I suppose,” she remarked. “The crooked ways attract, you know, when one has been brought up as I was.”
“Your poor mother had no love for them,” he reminded her.
“Beatrice has inherited everything that belonged to my mother. I am your own daughter, father. You ought to be proud of me. But there, I gave you another commission. Is it true that Jerry is really here?”
“He arrived in England on Wednesday on the Lusitania. He has been in town all the time since.”
A distinct frown darkened her face.
“He must have had my letter, then,” she murmured, half to herself.
“Without a doubt,” her father admitted. “Elizabeth, why do you take chances about seeing this man? He was fond of you in New York, I know, but then he was fond of his brother, too. He may not believe your story. It may be dangerous.”
She smiled.
“I think I can convince Jerry Gardner of anything I choose to tell him,” she said. “Besides, it is absolutely necessary that I have some information about Wenham's affairs. He must have a great deal more money somewhere and I must find out how we are to get at it.”
The professor shook his head.
“I don't like it,” he muttered. “Supposing he finds Beatrice!”
Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders.
“Beatrice is made of silent stuff,” she declared. “I should never be afraid of her. All the same, I wish I could find out just where she is. It would look better if we were living together.”
The professor shook his head sadly.
“She left us of her own free will,” he said, “and I don't believe, Elizabeth, that she would ever come back again. She knew very well what she was doing. She knew that our views of life were not hers. She didn't know half but she knew enough. You were quite right in what you said just now; Beatrice was more like her mother, and her mother was a good woman.”
“Really!” Elizabeth remarked, insolently.
“Don't answer like that,” he blustered, striking the table. “She was your mother, too.”
The woman's face was inscrutable, hard, and flawless behind the little cloud of tobacco smoke. The man began to tremble once more. Every time he ventured to assert himself, a single look from her was sufficient to quell him.
“Elizabeth,” he muttered, “you haven't a heart, you haven't a soul, you haven't a conscience. I wonder—what sort of a woman you are!”
“I am your daughter,” she reminded him, pleasantly.
“I was never quite so bad as that,” he went on, taking a large silk handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing his forehead. “I had to live and times were hard. I have cheated the public, perhaps. I haven't been above playing at cards a little cleverly, or making something where I could out of the weaker men. But, Elizabeth, I am afraid of you.”
“Men are generally afraid of the big stakes,” she remarked, flicking the ash from her cigarette. “They will cheat and lie for halfpennies, but they are bad gamblers when life or death—the big things are in the balance. Bah!” she went on. “Father, I want Jerry Gardner to come and see me.”
“If you can't make him come, my dear,” the professor said, “I am sure it will be of no use my trying.”
“He has had my letter,” she continued, half to herself; “he has had my letter and he does not come.”
“There is nothing to be done but wait,” her father decided.
“And meanwhile,” she went on, “supposing he were to discover Beatrice, supposing they two were to come together; supposing he were to tell her what he knows and she were to tell him what she guessed!”
The professor buried his face in his hands. Elizabeth threw her cigarette away with an impatient gesture.
“What an idiot I am!” she declared. “What is the use of wasting time like this?”
There was a knock at the door. A trim-looking French maid presented herself. She addressed her mistress in voluble French. A coiffeur and a manicurist were waiting in the next apartment; it was time that Madame habited herself. The professor listened to these announcements with an air of half-admiring wonder.
“I suppose I must be going,” he said, rising to his feet. “There is just one thing I should like to ask you, Elizabeth, if I may, before I go.”
“Well?”
“Who was the young man whom I met here just now?”
“Why do you ask that?” she demanded.
“I really do not know,” her father replied, thoughtfully, “except that his appearance seemed a little singular. In some respects he appeared so commonplace. His clothes and bearing, in fact, were so ordinary that I was surprised to find him here with you. And, on the other hand, his face—you must remember, my dear, that this is entirely a professional instinct; I am still interested in faces—”
“Quite so,” she admitted. “Go on. The young man rather puzzles me myself. I should like to hear what you make of him. What did you think of his face?”
“There was something powerful about it,” he declared, “something dogged, splendid, narrow, impossible,—the sort of face which belongs to a man who achieves great things because he is too stupid to recognize failure, even when it has him in its arms and its fingers are upon his throat. That young man has qualities, my dear, I am sure. Mind you, at present they are dormant, but he has qualities.”
She led him to the door.
“My dear father,” she said, “sometimes I really respect you. If you should come across that young man again, keep your eye upon him. He knows one thing at least which I wish he would tell us—he knows where Beatrice is.”
Her father looked at her in amazement.
“He knows where Beatrice is and he has not told you?”
She nodded.
“You tried to have him tell you and he refused?” the professor persisted.
“Exactly,” she admitted.
Her father put on his hat.
“I knew that young man was something out of the common.”
CHAPTER X. THE JOY OF BATTLE
They sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, in the topmost corner of the field. In the hedge, close at hand, was a commotion of birds. In the elm tree, a little further away, a thrush was singing. A soft west wind blew in their faces; the air immediately around them was filled with sunlight. Yet almost to their feet stretched one of those great arms of the city—a suburb, with its miles of villas, its clanging of electric cars, its waste plots, its rows of struggling shops. And only a little further away still, the body itself—the huge city, throbbing beneath its pall of smoke and cloud. The girl, who had been gazing steadily downwards for several moments, turned at last to her companion.
“Do you know,” she said, “that this makes me think of the first night you spoke to me? You remember it—up on the roof at Blenheim House?”
Tavernake did not answer for a moment. He was looking through a queerly-shaped instrument that he had brought with him at half-a-dozen stakes that he had laboriously driven into the ground some distance away. He was absolutely absorbed in his task.
“The main avenue,” he muttered softly to himself. “Yes, it must be a trifle more to the left. Then we get all the offshoots parallel and the better houses have their southern aspect. I beg your pardon, Beatrice, did you say anything?” he broke off suddenly.
She smiled.
“Nothing worth mentioning. I was just thinking that it reminded me a little up here of the first time you and I ever talked together.”
He glanced down at the panorama below, with its odd jumble of hideous buildings, softened here and there with wreaths of sunstained smoke, its great blots of ugliness irredeemable, insistent.
“It's different, of course,” she went on. “I remember, even now, the view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some great being, toiling and struggling—Life itself, groaning through space with human cogwheels. Up here one sees too much. Oh, my dear Leonard,” she continued, “to think that you, too, should be one of the devastators!”
He fitted his instrument into its case and replaced it in his pocket.
“Come,” he said, “you mustn't call me hard names. I shall remind you of the man whose works you are making me read. You know what he says—'The aesthete is, after all, only a dallier. The world lives and progresses by reason of its utilitarians.' This hill represents to me most of the things that are worth having in life.”
She laughed shortly.
“You will cut down those hedges and drive away the birds to find a fresh home; you will plough up the green grass, cut out a street and lay down granite stones. Then I see your ugly little houses coming up like mushrooms all over the place. You are a vandal, my dear Leonard.”
“I am simply obeying the law,” he answered. “After all, even from your own point of view, I do not think that it is so bad. Look closer, and you will find that the hedges are blackened here and there with smuts. The birds will find a better dwelling place further away. See how the smoke from those factory chimneys is sending its smuts across these fields. They are no longer country; they are better gathered in.”
She shivered.
“There is something about life,” she said, sadly, “which terrifies me. Every force that counts seems to be destructive.”
Up the steep hill behind them came the puffing and groaning of a small motor-car. They both turned their heads to watch it come into view. It was an insignificant affair of an almost extinct pattern, a single cylinder machine with a round tonneau back. The engine was knocking badly as the driver brought it to a standstill a few yards away from them. Involuntarily Tavernake stiffened as he saw the two men who descended from it, and who were already passing through the gate close to where they were. One was Mr. Dowling, the other the manager of the bank where they kept their account. Mr. Dowling recognized his manager with surprise but much cordiality.
“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “Dear me, this is most fortunate! You know Mr. Tavernake, of course, Belton? My manager, Mr. Tavernake—Mr. Belton, of the London & Westminster Bank. I have brought Mr. Belton up here, Tavernake, to have a look round, so that he may know what we mean to do with all the money we shall have to come and borrow, eh?”
The bank manager smiled.
“It is a very fine situation,” he remarked.
The eyes of the two men fell upon Beatrice, who had drawn a little to one side.
“May we have the pleasure, Tavernake?” Mr. Dowling said, graciously. “You are not married, I believe?”
“No, this is my sister,” Tavernake answered, slowly,—“Mr. Belton and Mr. Dowling.”
The two men acknowledged the salute with some slight surprise. Beatrice, although her clothes were simple, had always the air of belonging to a different world.
“Your brother, my dear Miss Tavernake,” Mr. Dowling declared, “is a perfect genius at discovering these desirable sites. This one I honestly consider to be the find of our lifetime. We have now,” he proceeded, turning to Mr. Belton, “certain information that the cars will run to whatever point we desire in this vicinity, and the Metropolitan Railway has also arranged for an extension of its system. To-morrow I propose,” Mr. Dowling continued, holding the sides of his coat and assuming a somewhat pompous manner, “to make an offer for the whole of this site. It will involve a very large sum of money indeed, but I am convinced that it will be a remunerative speculation.”
Tavernake remained grimly silent. This was scarcely the time or the place which he would have selected for an explanation with his employer. There were signs, however, that the thing was to be forced upon him.
“I am very pleased indeed to meet you here, Tavernake,” Mr. Dowling went on, “pleased both for personal reasons and because it shows, if I may be allowed to say so, the interest which you take in the firm's business, that you should devote your holiday to coming and—er—surveying the scene of our exploits, so to speak. Perhaps now that you are here you would be able to explain to Mr. Belton better than I should, just what it is that we propose.”
Tavernake hesitated for a moment. Finally, however, he proceeded to make clear a very elaborate and carefully thought out building scheme, to which both men listened with much attention. When he had finished, however, he turned round to Mr. Dowling, facing him squarely.
“You will understand, sir,” he concluded, “that a scheme such as I have pointed out could only be carried through if the whole of the property were in one person's hands. I may say that the information to which you referred a few days ago was perfectly correct. A considerable portion of the south side of the hill has already been purchased, besides certain other plots which would interfere considerably with any comprehensive scheme of building.”
Mr. Dowling's face fell at once; his tone was one of annoyance mingled with irritation.
“Come, come,” he declared, “this sounds very bad, Mr. Tavernake, very neglectful, very careless as to the interests of the firm. Why did we not keep our eye upon it? Why did we not forestall this other purchaser, eh? It appears to me that we have been slack, very slack indeed.”
Tavernake took a small book from his pocket.
“You will remember, sir,” he said, “that it was on the eleventh of May last year when I first spoke to you of this site.”
“Well, well,” Mr. Dowling exclaimed, sharply, “what of it?”
“You were starting out for a fortnight's golf somewhere,” Tavernake continued, “and you promised to look into the affair when you returned. I spoke to you again but you declared that you were far too busy to go into the matter at all for the present, you didn't care about this side of London, you considered that we had enough on hand—in fact, you threw cold water upon the idea.”
“I may not have been very enthusiastic at first,” Mr. Dowling admitted, grudgingly. “Latterly, however, I have come round to your views.”
“There have been several articles in various newspapers, and a good deal of talk,” Tavernake remarked, “which have been more effectual, I think, in bringing you round, than my advice. However, what I wish to say to you is this, sir, that when I found myself unable to interest you in this scheme, I went into it myself to some extent.”
“Went into it yourself?” Mr. Dowling repeated, incredulously. “What do you mean, Tavernake? What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean that I have invested my savings in the purchase of several plots of land upon this hillside,” Tavernake explained.
“On your own account?” Mr. Dowling demanded. “Your savings, indeed!”
“Certainly,” Tavernake answered. “Why not?”
“But it's the firm's business, sir—the firm's, not yours!”
“The firm had the opportunity,” Tavernake pointed out, “and were not inclined to avail themselves of it. If I had not bought the land when I did, some one else would have bought the whole of it long ago.”
Mr. Dowling was obviously in a furious temper.
“Do you mean to tell me, sir,” he exclaimed, “that you dared to enter into private speculations while still an employee of the firm? It is a most unheard-of thing, unwarranted, ridiculous. I shall require you, sir, to at once make over the plots of land to us—to the firm, you understand. We shall give you your price, of course, although I expect you paid much more for it than we should have done. Still, we must give you what you paid, and four per cent interest for your money.”
“I am sorry,” Tavernake replied, “but I am afraid that I should require better terms than that. In fact,” he continued, “I do not wish to sell. I have given a great deal of thought and time to this matter, and I intend to carry it out as a personal speculation.”
“Then you will carry it out, sir, from some other place than from within the walls of my office,” Mr. Dowling declared, furiously. “You understand that, Tavernake?”
“Perfectly,” Tavernake answered. “You wish me to leave you. It is very unwise of you to suggest it, but I am quite prepared to go.”
“You will either resell me those plots at cost price, or you shall not set foot within the office again,” Mr. Dowling insisted. “It is a gross breach of faith, this. I never heard of such a thing in all my life. Most unprofessional, impossible behavior!”
Tavernake showed no signs of anger—he simply turned a little away.
“I shall not sell you my land, Mr. Dowling,” he said, “and it will suit me very well to leave your employ. You appear,” he continued, “to expect some one else to do the whole of the work for you while you reap the entire profits. Those days have gone by. My business in the world is to make a fortune for myself, and not for you!”
“How dare you, sir!” Mr. Dowling cried. “I never heard such impertinence in my life.”
“You haven't done a stroke of work for five years,” Tavernake went on, unmoved, “and my efforts have supplied you with a fairly good income. In future, those efforts will be directed towards my own advancement.”
Mr. Dowling turned back toward the car.
“Young man,” he said, “you can brazen it out as much as you like, but you have been guilty of a gross breach of faith. I shall take care that the exact situation is made known in all responsible quarters. You'll get no situation with any firm with whom I am acquainted—I can promise you that. If you have anything more to say to Dowling, Spence & Company, let it be in writing.”
They parted company there and then. Tavernake and Beatrice went down the hill in silence.
“Does this bother you at all?” she inquired presently.
“Nothing to speak of,” Tavernake answered. “It had to come. I wasn't quite ready but that doesn't matter.”
“What shall you do now?” she asked.
“Borrow enough to buy the whole of the hill,” he replied.
She looked back.
“Won't that mean a great deal of money?”
He nodded.
“It will be a big thing, of course,” he admitted. “Never mind, I dare say I shall be able to interest some one in it. In any case, I never meant Mr. Dowling to make a fortune out of this.”
They walked on in silence a little further. Then she spoke again, with some hesitation.
“I suppose that what you have done is quite fair, Leonard?”