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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lucinda
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Title: Lucinda

Author: Anthony Hope

Release date: April 2, 2016 [eBook #51642]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LUCINDA ***

 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
 ═══════════
LUCINDA
───────────
ANTHONY HOPE
═══════════

LUCINDA
BY

ANTHONY HOPE
AUTHOR OF “THE SECRET OF THE
TOWER,” “THE PRISONER OF ZENDA,”
“RUPERT OF HENTZAU,” ETC.
 THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY

ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Face in the Taxi 1

II. The Signal 13
III. A High Explosive 26
IV. The Fourth Party 38
V. Catch Who Catch Can! 52
VI. Venice 64
VII. Self-Defense 78
VIII. The Needlewoman 91
IX. Like to Like 103
X. Her Ladyship 116
XI. Dundrannanization 131
XII. A Secret Visit 144
XIII. An Introduction 157
XIV. For Auld Lang Syne 171
XV. The System Works 186
XVI. Purple—and Fine Linen 199
XVII. Rebellion 211
XVIII. The Winning Ticket 225
XIX. Views and Whims 239
XX. Living Funnily 252
XXI. Partie Carrée 264
 XXII. Suitable Surroundings 276
XXIII. The Banquet 288
XXIV. The Mascot 299
XXV. Homage 312
XXVI. The Air on the Coast 325
XXVII. In Five Years 339
LUCINDA
 CHAPTER I

THE FACE IN THE TAXI

H
IS “Business Ambassador” was the title which my old chief,
Ezekiel Coldston, used to give me. I daresay that it served as
well as any other to describe with a pleasant mixture of
dignity and playfulness, the sort of glorified bag-man or
drummer that I was. It was my job to go into all quarters of the
earth where the old man had scented a concession or a contract—
and what a nose he had for them!—and make it appear to powerful
persons that the Coldston firm would pay more for the concession
(more in the long run, at all events) or ask less for the contract (less
in the first instance, at all events) than any other responsible firm,
company, or corporation in the world. Sir Ezekiel (as in due course
he became) took me from a very low rung of the regular diplomatic
ladder into his service on the recommendation of my uncle, Sir Paget
Rillington, who was then at the top of that same ladder. My employer
was good enough to tell me more than once that I had justified the
recommendation.
“You’ve excellent manners, Julius,” he told me. “Indeed, quite
engaging. Plenty of tact! You work—fairly hard; your gift for
languages is of a great value, and, if you have no absolute genius for
business—well, I’m at the other end of the cable. I’ve no cause to be
dissatisfied.”
 “As much as you could expect of the public school and varsity
brand, sir?” I suggested.
“More,” said Ezekiel decisively.
I liked the job. I was very well paid. I saw the world; I met all
sorts of people; and I was always royally treated, since, if I was
always trying to get on the right side of my business or political
friends, they were equally anxious to get on the right side of me—
which meant, in their sanguine imaginations, the right side of Sir
Ezekiel; a position which I believe to correspond rather to an
abstract mathematical conception than to anything actually realizable
in experience.
However, I do not want to talk about all that. I mention the few
foregoing circumstances only to account for the fact that I found
myself in town in the summer of 1914, back from a long and distant
excursion, temporary occupant of a furnished flat (I was a homeless
creature) in Buckingham Gate, enjoying the prospect of a few
months’ holiday, and desirous of picking up the thread of my family
and social connections—perhaps with an eye to country house visits
and a bit of shooting or fishing by and by. First of all, though, after a
short spell of London, I was due at Cragsfoot, to see Sir Paget, tell
him about my last trip, and console him for the loss of Waldo’s
society.
Not that anything tragic had happened to Waldo. On the contrary,
he was going to be married. I had heard of the engagement a month
before I sailed from Buenos Aires, and the news had sent my
thoughts back to an autumn stay at Cragsfoot two years before, with
Sir Paget and old Miss Fleming (we were great friends, she and I);
the two boys, Waldo and Arsenio, just down from Oxford;
respectable Mrs. Knyvett—oh, most indubitably respectable Mrs.
Knyvett;—myself, older than the boys, younger than the seniors, and
so with an agreeable alternation of atmosphere offered to me—and
Lucinda! True that Nina Frost was a good deal there too, coming
over from that atrocious big villa along the coast—Briarmount they
called it—still, she was not of the house party; there was always a
last talk, or frolic, after Nina had gone home, and after Mrs. Knyvett
had gone to bed. Miss Fleming, “Aunt Bertha,” liked talks and frolics;
and Sir Paget was popularly believed not to go to bed at all; he used
to say that he had got out of the habit in Russia. So it was a merry
time—a merry, thoughtless——!
Why, no, not the least thoughtless. I had nearly fallen into a
cliché, a spurious commonplace. Youth may not count and calculate.
It thinks like the deuce—and is not ashamed to talk its thoughts right
out. You remember the Oxford talk, any of you who have been there,
not (with submission to critics) all about football and the Gaiety, but
through half the night about the Trinity, or the Nature of the
Absolute, or Community of Goods, or why in Tennyson (this is my
date rather than Waldo’s) Arthur had no children by Guinevere, or
whether the working classes ought to limit—well, and so on. The
boys brought us all that atmosphere, if not precisely those topics,
and mighty were the discussions,—with Sir Paget to whet the blades,
if ever they grew blunt, with one of his aphorisms, and Aunt Bertha
to round up a discussion with an anecdote.
And now Lucinda had accepted Waldo! They were to be married
now—directly. She had settled in practice the problem we had once
debated through a moonlight evening on the terrace that looked out
to sea. At what age should man and woman marry? He at thirty, she
at twenty-five, said one side—in the interest of individual happiness.
He at twenty-one, she at eighteen, said the other, in the interest of
social wellbeing. (Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed.) Lucinda was now
twenty-one and Waldo twenty-six. It was a compromise—though,
when I come to think of it, she had taken no part in discussing the
problem. “I should do as I felt,” had been her one and only
contribution; and she also went to bed in the early stages of the
wordy battle. Incidentally I may observe that Lucinda’s exits were
among the best things that she did—yes, even in those early days,
when they were all instinct and no art. From Sir Paget downwards
we men felt that, had the problem been set for present solution, we
should all have felt poignantly interested in what Lucinda felt that
she would do. No man of sensibility—as they used to say before we
learnt really colloquial English—could have felt otherwise.
 I will not run on with these recollections just now, but I was
chuckling over them on the morning of Waldo’s and Lucinda’s
wedding day—a very fine day in July, on which, after late and
leisurely breakfast, I looked across the road on the easy and
scattered activity of the barracks’ yard. That scene was soon to
change—but the future wore its veil. With a mind vacant of
foreboding, I was planning only how to spend the time till half-past
two. I decided to dress myself, go to the club, read the papers,
lunch, and so on to St. George’s. For, of course, St. George’s it was
to be. Mrs. Knyvett had a temporary flat in Mount Street; Sir Paget
had no town house, but put up at Claridge’s; he and Waldo—and
Aunt Bertha—had been due to arrive there from Cragsfoot yesterday.
Perhaps it was a little curious that Waldo had not been in town for
the last week; but he had not, and I had seen none of the Cragsfoot
folk since I got home. I had left a card on Mrs. Knyvett, but—well, I
suppose that she and her daughter were much too busy to take any
notice. I am afraid that I was rather glad of it; apprehensive visions
of a partie carrée—the lovers mutually absorbed, and myself left to
engross Mrs. Knyvett—faded harmlessly into the might-have-beens.
I walked along the Mall, making for my club in St. James’s Street.
At the corner by Marlborough House I had to wait before crossing
the road; a succession of motors and taxis held me up. I was still
thinking of Lucinda; at least I told myself a moment later that I must
have been still thinking of Lucinda, because only in that way could I
account, on rational lines, for what happened to me. It was one
o’clock—the Palace clock had just struck. The wedding was at half-
past two, and the bride was, beyond reasonable doubt, now being
decked out for it, or, perchance, taking necessary sustenance. But
not driving straight away from the scene of operations, not looking
out of the window of that last taxi which had just whisked by me!
Yet the face at the taxi window—I could have sworn it was Lucinda’s.
It wore her smile—and not many faces did that. Stranger still, it
dazzled with that vivid flush which she herself—the real Lucinda—
exhibited only on the rarest occasions, the moments of high feeling.
It had come on the evening when Waldo and Arsenio Valdez
quarreled at Cragsfoot.
The vision came and went, but left me strangely taken aback, in
a way ashamed of myself, feeling a fool. I shrugged my shoulders
angrily as I crossed Pall Mall. As I reached the pavement on the
other tide, I took out my cigarette case; I wanted to be normal and
reasonable; I would smoke.
“Take a light from mine, Julius,” said a smooth and dainty voice.
It may seem absurd—an affectation of language—to call a voice
“dainty,” but the epithet is really appropriate to Arsenio Valdez’s way
of talking, whether in Spanish, Italian, or English. As was natural, he
spoke them all with equal ease and mastery, but he used none of
them familiarly; each was treated as an art, not in the choice of
words—that would be tedious in every-day life—but in articulation.
We others used often to chaff him about it, but he always asserted
that it was the “note of a Castilian.”
There he stood, at the bottom corner of St. James’s Street, neat,
cool, and trim as usual—like myself, he was wearing a wedding
garment—and looking his least romantic and his most monkeyish: he
could do wonders in either direction.
“Hullo! what tree have you dropped from, Monkey?” I asked. But
then I went on, without waiting for an answer. “I say, that taxi must
have passed you too, didn’t it?”
“A lot of taxis have been passing. Which one?”
“The one with the girl in it—the girl like Lucinda. Didn’t you see
her?”
“I never saw a girl like Lucinda—except Lucinda herself. Have you
lunched? No, I mean the question quite innocently, old chap.
Because, if you haven’t, we might together. Of course you’re bound
for the wedding as I am? At least, I can just manage, if the bride’s
punctual. I’ve got an appointment that I must keep at three-fifteen.”
“That gives you time enough. Come and have lunch with me at
White’s.” I put my arm in his and we walked up the street. I forgot
my little excitement over the girl in the cab.
 Though he was a pure-blooded Spaniard, though he had been
educated at Beaumont and Christ Church, Valdez was more at home
in Italy than anywhere else. His parents had settled there, in the
train of the exiled Don Carlos, and the son still owned a small
palazzo at Venice and derived the bulk of his means (or so I
understood) from letting the more eligible floors of it, keeping the
attics for himself. Here he consorted with wits, poets, and “Futurists,”
writing a bit himself—Italian was the language he employed for his
verses—till he wanted a change, when he would shoot off to the
Riviera, or Spain, or Paris, or London, as the mood took him. But he
had not been to England for nearly two years now; he gave me to
understand that the years of education had given him, for the time,
a surfeit of my native land: not a surprising thing, perhaps.
“So I lit out soon after our stay at Cragsfoot, and didn’t come
back again till a fortnight ago, when some business brought me over.
And I’m off again directly, in a day or two at longest.”
“Lucky you’ve hit the wedding. I suppose you haven’t seen
anything of my folks then—or of the Knyvetts?”
“I haven’t seen Waldo or Sir Paget, but I’ve been seeing
something of Mrs. Knyvett and Lucinda since I got here. And they
were out in Venice last autumn; and, as they took an apartment in
my house, I saw a good deal of them there.”
“Oh, I didn’t know they’d been to Venice. Nobody ever writes to
tell me anything when I’m away.”
“Poor old chap! Get a wife, and she’ll write to tell you she’s in
debt. I say, oughtn’t we to be moving? It won’t look well to be late,
you know.”
“Don’t be fidgety. We’ve got half an hour, and it’s not above ten
minutes’ walk.”
“There’ll be a squash, and I want a good place. Come on, Julius.”
He rose from the table rather abruptly; indeed, with an air of
something like impatience or irritation.
“Hang it! you might be going to be married yourself, you’re in
such a hurry,” I said, as I finished my glass of brandy.
 As we walked, Valdez was silent. I looked at his profile; the
delicate fine lines were of a poet’s, or what a poet’s should be to our
fancy. Not so much as a touch of the monkey! That touch, indeed,
when it did come, came on the lips; and it came seldom. It was the
devastating acumen and the ruthless cruelty of boyhood that had
winged the shaft of his school nickname. Yet it had followed him to
the varsity; it followed him now; I myself often called him by it.
“Monkey Valdez”! Not pretty, you know. It did not annoy him in the
least. He thought it just insular; possibly that is all it was. But such
persistence is some evidence of a truthfulness in it.
“Have you been trying a fall with Dame Fortune lately?” I asked.
He turned his face to me, smiling. “I’m a reformed character. At
least, I was till a fortnight ago. I hadn’t touched a card or seen a
table for above a year. Seemed not to want to! A great change, eh?
But I didn’t miss it. Then when—when I decided to come over here,
I thought I would go round by the Riviera, and just get out at Monte
Carlo, and have a shot—between trains, you know. I wanted to see if
my luck was in. So I got off, had lunch, and walked into the rooms. I
backed my number everyway I could—en plein, impair, all the rest. I
stood to win about two hundred louis.”
“Lost, of course?”
“Not a bit of it. I won.”
“And then lost?”
“No. I pouched the lot and caught my train. I wasn’t going to
spoil the omen.” He was smiling now—very contentedly.
“What was the number?”
“Twenty-one.”
“This is the twenty-first of July,” I observed.
“Gamblers must be guided by something, some fancy, some
omen,” he said. “I had just heard that Waldo and Lucinda were to be
married on the twenty-first.”
The monkey did peep out for a moment then; but we were
already in George Street; the church was in sight, and my attention
was diverted. “Better for you if you’d lost,” I murmured carelessly.
 “Aye, aye, dull prudence!” he said mockingly. “But—the sensation!
I can feel it now!”
We were on the other side of the road from the church, but
almost opposite to it, as he spoke, and it was only then that I
noticed anything peculiar. The first thing which I marked was an
unusual animation in the usual small crowd of the “general public”
clustered on either side of the steps: they were talking a lot to one
another. Still more peculiar was the fact that all the people in
carriages and cars seemed to have made a mistake; they drew up
for a moment before the entrance; a beadle, or some official of that
semi-ecclesiastical order, said something to them, and they moved
on again—nobody got out! To crown it, a royal brougham drove up—
every Londoner can tell one yards away, if it were only by the horses
—and stopped. My uncle, Sir Paget himself, came down the steps,
took off his tall hat, and put his head in at the carriage window for a
moment; then he signed, and no doubt spoke, to the footman, who
had not even jumped down from the box or taken off his hat. And
the royal brougham drove on.
“Well, I’m damned!” said I.
Valdez jerked his head in a quick sideways nod. “Something
wrong? Looks like it!”
I crossed the road quickly, and he kept pace with me. My
intention was to join Sir Paget, but that beadle intercepted us.
“Wedding’s unavoidably postponed, gentlemen,” he said. “Sudden
indisposition of the bride.”
There it was! I turned to Valdez in dismay—with a sudden, almost
comical, sense of being let down, choused, made a fool of. “Well,
twenty-one’s not been a lucky number for poor Lucinda, at all
events!” I said—rather pointlessly; but his story had been running in
my head.
He made no direct reply; a little shrug seemed at once to accuse
and to accept destiny. “Sir Paget’s beckoning to you,” he said. “Do
you think I might come too?”
 “Why, of course, my dear fellow. We both want to know what’s
wrong, don’t we?”
 CHAPTER II

THE SIGNAL

B
Y now it was past the half-hour; the arrivals dwindled to a few
late stragglers, who were promptly turned away by the beadle;
the crowd of onlookers dispersed with smiles, shrugs, and a
whistle or two: only a group of reporters stood on the lowest
step, talking to one another and glancing at Sir Paget, as though they
would like to tackle him but were doubtful of their reception. One did
quietly detach himself from the group and walked up to where my
uncle stood on the top step. I saw Sir Paget raise his hat, bow
slightly, and speak one sentence. The man bowed in return, and
rejoined his fellows with a rueful smile; then all of them made off
together down the street.
My uncle was a little below middle height, but very upright and
spare, so that he looked taller than he was. He had large features—a
big, high-peaked nose, wide, thin-lipped mouth, bushy eyebrows, and
very keen blue eyes. He bore himself with marked dignity—even with
some stiffness towards the world at large, although among intimates
he was the most urbane and accessible of men. His long experience
in affairs had given him imperturbable composure; even at this
moment he did not look the least put out. His manner and speech
were modeled on the old school of public men—formal and elaborate
when the occasion demanded, but easy, offhand, and familiar in
private: to hear him was sometimes like listening to behind-the-
scenes utterances of, say, Lord Melbourne or the great Duke which
have come down to us in memoirs of their period.
When we went up to him, he nodded to me and gave his hand to
Valdez. He had not seen him for two years, but he only said, “Ah, you
here, Arsenio?” and went on, “Well, boys, here’s a damned kettle of
fish! The girl’s cut and run, by Gad, she has!”
Valdez muttered “Good Lord!” or “Good Heavens!” or something of
that kind. I found nothing to say, but the face I had seen at the taxi
window flashed before my eyes again.
“Went out at ten this morning—for a walk, she said, before
dressing. And she never came back. Half an hour ago a boy-
messenger left a note for her mother. ‘I can’t do it, Mother. So I’ve
gone.’—That was all. Aunt Bertha had been called in to assist at the
dressing-up, and she sent word to me. Mrs. Knyvett collapsed, of
course.”
“And—and Waldo? Is he here?” asked Valdez. “I’d like to see him
and—and say what I could.”
“I got him away by the back door—to avoid those press fellows:
he consented to go back to the hotel and wait for me there.”
“It’s a most extraordinary thing,” said Valdez, who wore an air of
embarrassment quite natural under the circumstances. He was—or
had been—an intimate of the family; but this was an extremely
intimate family affair. “I called in Mount Street three days ago,” he
went on, “and she seemed quite—well, normal, you know; very bright
and happy, and all that.”
Sir Paget did not speak. Valdez looked at his watch. “Well, you’ll
want to be by yourselves, and I’ve got an appointment.”
“Good-by, my boy. You must come and see us presently. You’re
looking very well, Arsenio. Good-by. Don’t you go, Julius, I want you.”
Arsenio walked down the steps very quickly—indeed, he nearly ran
—and got into a taxi which was standing by the curb. He turned and
waved his hand towards us as he got in. My uncle was frowning and
pursing up his thin, supple lips. He took my arm and we came down
the steps together.
 “There’s the devil to pay with Waldo,” he said, pressing his hand
on my sleeve. “It was all I could do to make him promise to wait till
we’d talked it over.”
“What does he want to do?”
“He’s got one of his rages. You know ‘em? They don’t come often,
but when they do—well, it’s damned squally weather! And he looks
on her as as good as his wife, you see.” He glanced up at me—I am a
good deal the taller—with a very unwonted look of distress and
apprehension. “He’s not master of himself. It would never do for him
to go after them in the state he’s in now.”
“After—them?”
“That’s his view; I incline to it myself, too.”
“She was alone in the taxi.” I blurted it out, more to myself than to
him, and quite without thinking.
I told him of my encounter; it had seemed a delusion, but need
not seem so now.
“Driving past Marlborough House into the Mall? Looks like Victoria,
doesn’t it? Any luggage on the cab?”
“I didn’t notice, sir.”
“Then you’re an infernal fool, Julius,” said Sir Paget peevishly.
I was not annoyed, though I felt sure that my uncle himself would
have thought no more about luggage than I had, if he had seen the
face as I had seen it. But I felt shy about describing the flush on a
girl’s face and the sparkle in her eyes; that was more Valdez’s line of
country than mine. So I said nothing, and we fell into a dreary silence
which lasted till we got to the hotel.
I went upstairs behind Sir Paget in some trepidation. I had, for
years back, heard of Waldo’s “white rages”; I had seen only one, and
I had not liked it. Waldo was not, to my thinking, a Rillington: we are
a dark, spare race. He was a Fleming—stoutly built, florid and rather
ruddy in the face. But the passion seemed to suck up his blood; it
turned him white. It was rather curious and uncanny, while it lasted.
The poor fellow used to be very much ashamed of himself when it
was over; but while it was on—well, he did not seem to be ashamed
of anything he did or said. He was dangerous—to himself and others.
Really, that night at Cragsfoot, I had thought that he was going to
knock Valdez’s head off, though the ostensible cause of quarrel was
nothing more serious—or perhaps I should say nothing less abstract—
than the Legitimist principle, of which Valdez, true to his paternal
tradition, elected to pose as the champion and brought on himself a
bitter personal attack, in which such words as hypocrites, parasites,
flunkeys, toadeaters, etc., etc., figured vividly. And all this before the
ladies, and in the presence of his father, whose absolute authority
over him he was at all normal moments eager to acknowledge.
“I’m going to tell him that you think you saw her this morning,”
said Sir Paget, pausing outside the door of the room. “He has a right
to know; and it’s not enough really to give him any clew that might
be—well, too easy!” My uncle gave me a very wry smile as he spoke.
Waldo was older now; perhaps he had greater self-control,
perhaps the magnitude of his disaster forbade any fretful exhibition of
fury. It was a white rage—indeed, he was pale as a ghost—but he
was quiet; the lightning struck inwards. He received his father’s
assurance that everything had been managed as smoothly as possible
—with the minimum of publicity—without any show of interest; he
was beyond caring about publicity or ridicule, I think. On the other
hand, it may be that these things held too high a place in Sir Paget’s
mind; he almost suggested that, if the thing could be successfully
hushed up, it would be much the same as if it had never happened:
perhaps the diplomatic instinct sets that way. Waldo’s concern stood
rooted in the thing itself. This is not to say that his pride was not hit,
as well as his love; but it was the blow that hurt him, not the noise
that the blow might make.
Probably Sir Paget saw this for himself before many minutes had
passed; for he turned to me, saying, “You’d better tell him your story,
for what it’s worth, Julius.”
Waldo listened to me with a new look of alertness, but the story
seemed to come to less than he had expected. His interest flickered
out again, and he listened with an impatient frown to Sir Paget’s
conjectures as to the fugitive’s destination. But he put two or three
questions to me.
“Did she recognize you? See you, I mean—bow, or nod, or
anything?”
“Nothing at all; I don’t think she saw me. She passed me in a
second, of course.”
“It must have been Lucinda, of course. You couldn’t have been
mistaken?”
“I thought I was at the time, because it seemed impossible. Of
course, now—as things stand—there’s no reason why it shouldn’t
have been Lucinda, and no doubt it was.”
“How was she looking?”
I had to attempt that description, after all! “Very animated; very—
well, eager, you know. She was flushed; she looked—well, excited.”
“You’re dead sure that she was alone?”
“Oh, yes, I’m positive as to that.”
“Well, it doesn’t help us much,” observed Sir Paget. “Even if
anything could help us! For the present I think I shouldn’t mention it
to any one else—except, of course, Mrs. Knyvett and Aunt Bertha. No
more talk of any kind than we can help!”
“Besides you two, I’ve only mentioned it to Valdez; and, when I
did that, I didn’t believe that the girl was Lucinda.”
“Monkey Valdez! Did he come to the—to the church?” Waldo
asked quickly. “I didn’t know he was in London, or even in England.”
“He’s been in town about a fortnight, I gathered. He’d seen the
Knyvetts, he said, and I suppose they asked him to the wedding.”
“You met him there—and told him about this—this seeing
Lucinda?”
“I didn’t meet him at the church. He lunched with me before and
we walked there together.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, only some half-joking remark that you couldn’t take any
other girl for Lucinda. He didn’t seem to attach any importance to it.”
 Waldo’s eyes were now set steadily on my face. “Did you tell him
at lunch, or as you walked to the church, or at the church?”
“As a matter of fact, before lunch. I mentioned the matter—that
was half in joke too—as soon as I met him in the street.”
Sir Paget was about to speak, but Waldo silenced him imperiously.
“Half a minute, Father. I want to know about this. Where did you
meet—and when?”
“As soon as the taxi—the one with the girl in it—had gone by. I
had to wait for it to go by. I crossed over to St. James’s Street and
stopped to light a cigarette. Just as I was getting out a match, he
spoke to me.”
“Where did he come from?”
“I don’t know; I didn’t see him till he spoke to me.”
“He might have been standing at the corner there—or near it?”
“Yes, for all I know—or just have reached there, or just crossed
from the other corner of St. James’s Street. I really don’t know. Why
does it matter, Waldo?”
“You’re dense, man, you’re dense!”
“Gently, Waldo, old boy!” Sir Paget interposed softly. He was
standing with his back to the fireplace, smoking cigarette after
cigarette, but quite quietly, not in a fluster. It was plain that he had
begun to follow the scent which Waldo was pursuing so keenly.
“I beg your pardon, Julius. But look here. If he was at either
corner of the street, or on the refuge in the middle—there is one, I
think—he may well have been there a moment before—standing
there, waiting perhaps. The taxi that passed you would have passed
him. He would have seen the girl just as you saw her.”
“By Jove, that’s true! But he’d have told me if he had.”
“He didn’t say he hadn’t?”
I searched my memory. “No, he didn’t say that. But if—well, if, as
you seem to suggest, he was there in order to see her, and did see
her——”
“It was funny enough your happening to see her. It would be a lot
funnier coincidence if he just happened to be there, and just
happened to see her too! And just as funny if he was there and didn’t
see her, eh?”
“But how could he carry it off as he did?”
“My dear chap, the Monkey would carry off a load of bricks that
hit him on the head! There’s nothing in that.”
“What’s your theory, Waldo?” Sir Paget asked quietly.
Waldo sat silent for a full minute. He seemed by now to be over
the first fit of his rage; there was color in his cheeks again. But his
eyes were bright, intent, and hard. He seemed to be piecing together
the theory for which his father asked him—piecing it together so as to
give it to us in a complete form. Waldo was not quick-witted, but he
had a good brain. If he got hold of a problem, he would worry it to a
solution.
“I’ve written to her every day,” he began slowly. “And she’s
answered, quite affectionately—she’s never offensive; she’s given me
no hint that she meant to go back on me like this. The day before
yesterday I wired to her to know if I might come up; she wired: ‘For
pity’s sake don’t. I am too busy. Wait till the day.’”
“Nothing much in that,” said his father. “She’d put it that way—
playfully.”
“Nothing much if it stood alone,” Waldo agreed. “But suppose she
was struggling between two influences—mine and his.” For a moment
his voice faltered. “He’s always been against me—always—ever since
that time at Cragsfoot.” I heard a swallow in his throat, and he went
on again steadily. “Never mind that. Look at it as a case, a problem,
impersonally. A girl is due to marry a man; another is besieging her.
She can’t make up her mind—can’t make it up even on the very day
before the wedding; or, if you like, won’t admit to herself that she has
really resolved to break her promise, to be false to the man to whom
she is already——” Again there was a falter in his voice—“already
really a wife, so far as anything short of—short of the actual thing
itself—can make her——”
He came to a sudden stop; he was unable to finish; he had invited
us to a dispassionate consideration of the case as a case, as a
problem; in the end he was not equal to laying it before us
dispassionately. “Oh, you see, Father!” he groaned.
“Yes,” said Sir Paget. “I see the thing—on your hypothesis. She
couldn’t make up her mind—or wouldn’t admit that she had. So she
told the other man——”
“Valdez?”
“Yes, Julius. Arsenio Valdez. She told Arsenio to be at a certain
spot at a certain time—a time when, if she were going to keep her
promise, she would be getting ready for her wedding. ‘Be at the
corner of St. James’s Street at one o’clock.’ That would be it, wouldn’t
it? If I drive by in a taxi, alone, it means yes to you, no to him. If I
don’t, it means the opposite.’ That’s what you mean, Waldo?”
Waldo nodded assent; but I could not readily accept the idea.
“You mean, when I saw her she’d just seen him, and when I saw
him, he’d just seen her?”
“Wouldn’t that account for the animation and excitement you
noticed in her face—for the flush that struck you? She had just given
the signal; she’d just”—he smiled grimly—“crossed her Rubicon,
Julius.”
“But why wasn’t he with her? Why didn’t he go with her? Why did
he come to the wedding? Why did he go through that farce?”
Sir Paget shrugged his shoulders. “Some idea of throwing us off
the scent and getting a clear start, probably.”
“Yes, it might have been that,” I admitted. “And it does account
for—for the way she looked. But the idea never crossed my mind.
There wasn’t a single thing in his manner to raise any suspicion of the
sort. If you’re right, it was a wonderful bit of acting.”
Waldo turned to me—he had been looking intently at his father
while Sir Paget expounded the case—with a sharp movement. “Did
Monkey ask for me when he came to the church?”
“Yes, I think he did. Yes, he did. He said he’d like to see you and—
and say something, you know.”
“I thought so! That would have been his moment! He wanted to
see how I took it, damn him! Coming to the church was his idea. He
may have persuaded her that it was a good ruse, a clever trick. But
really he wanted to see me—in the dirt. Monkey Valdez all over!”
I believe that I positively shivered at the bitterness of his anger
and hatred. They had been chums, pals, bosom friends. And I loved—
I had loved—them both. Sir Paget, too, had made almost a son of
Arsenio Valdez.
“And for that—he shall pay,” said Waldo, rising to his feet. “Doesn’t
he deserve to pay for that, Father?”
“What do you propose to do, Waldo?”
“Catch him and—give him his deserts.”
“He’ll have left the country before you can catch him.”
“I can follow him. And I shall. I can find him, never fear!”
“You must think of her,” I ventured to suggest.
“Afterwards. As much as you like—afterwards.”
“But by the time you find them, they’ll have—I mean, they’ll be
——”
“Hold your tongue, for God’s sake, Julius!”
I turned to Sir Paget. “If he insists on going, let me go with him,
sir,” I said.
“Yes, that would be—wise,” he assented, but, as I thought, rather
absently.
Waldo gave a laugh. “All right, Julius. If you fancy the job, come
along and pick up the pieces! There’ll be one of us to bury, at all
events.” I suppose that I made some instinctive gesture of protest, for
he added: “She was mine—mine.”
Sir Paget looked from him to me, and back again from me to him.
“You must neither of you leave the country,” he said.
 CHAPTER III

A HIGH EXPLOSIVE

I
HAVE said so much about Waldo’s “rages” that I may have
given quite a wrong impression of him. The “rages” were
abnormal, rare and (if one may not use the word unnatural
about a thing that certainly was in his nature) at least
paradoxical. The normal—the all but invariable and the ultimately
ruling—Waldo was a placid, good-tempered fellow; not very
energetic mentally, yet very far from a fool; a moderate
Conservative, a good sportsman, an ardent Territorial officer, and a
crack rifle-shot. He had an independent fortune from his mother, and
his “Occupation” would, I suppose, have to be entered on the
Government forms as “None” or “Gentleman”; all the same, he led a
full, active, and not altogether useless existence. Quite a type of his
class, in fact, except for those sporadic rages, which came, I think,
in the end from an extreme, an exaggerated, sense of justice. He
would do no wrong, but neither would he suffer any; it seemed to
him an outrage that any one should trench on his rights: among his
rights he included fair, honorable and courteous treatment—and a
very high standard of it. He asked what he gave. It seems odd that a
delicacy of sensitiveness should result, even now and then, in a
mad-bull rage, but it is not, when one thinks it over, unintelligible.
Sir Paget had spoken in his most authoritative tone; he had not
proffered advice; he issued an order. I had never known Waldo to
refuse, in the end, to obey an order from his father. Would he obey
this one? It did not look probable. His retort was hot.
“I at least must judge this matter for myself.”
“So you shall then, when you’ve heard my reasons. Sit down,
Waldo.”
“I can listen to you very well as I am, thank you.” “As he was”
meant standing in the middle of the room, glowering at Sir Paget,
who was still smoking in front of the fireplace. I was halfway
between them, facing the door of the room. “And I can’t see what
reasons there can be that I haven’t already considered.”
“There can be, though,” Sir Paget retorted calmly. “And when I
tell you that I have to break my word in giving them to you, I’m sure
that you won’t treat them lightly.”
Frowning formidably, Waldo gave an impatient and scornful toss
of his head. He was very hostile, most unamenable to reason—or
reasons.
At this moment in walked Miss Fleming—Aunt Bertha as we all
called her, though I at least had no right to do so. She was actually
aunt to Waldo’s mother, the girl much younger than himself whom
Sir Paget had married in his fortieth year, and who had lived for only
ten years after her marriage. When she fell sick, Aunt Bertha had
come to Cragsfoot to nurse her; she had been there ever since,
mistress of Sir Paget’s house, his locum tenens while he was serving
abroad, guide of Waldo’s youth, now the closest friend in the world
to father and son alike—and, looking back, I am not sure that there
was then any one nearer to me either. I delighted in Aunt Bertha.
She was looking—as indeed she always did to me—like a
preternaturally aged and wise sparrow, with her tiny figure, her
short yet aquiline nose, her eyes sparkling and keen under the
preposterous light-brown “front” which she had the audacity to wear.
I hastened to wheel a chair forward for her, and she sank into it (it
was an immense “saddlebag” affair and nearly swallowed her) with a
sigh of weariness.
 “How I hate big hotels, and lifts, and modern sumptuousness in
general,” she observed.
None of us made any comment or reply. Her eyes twinkled
quickly over the group we made, resting longest on Waldo’s
stubborn face. But she spoke to me. “Put me up to date, Julius.”
That meant a long story. Well, perhaps it gave Waldo time to cool
off a little; halfway through he even sat down, though with an angry
flop.
“Yes,” said Aunt Bertha at the end. “And you may all imagine the
morning I had! I got to Mount Street at half-past eleven. Lucinda still
out for a walk—still! At twelve, no Lucinda! At half-past, anxiety—at
one, consternation—and for Mrs. Knyvett, sherry and biscuits. At
about a quarter to two, despair. And then—the note! I never went
through such a morning! However, she’s in bed now—with a hot-
water bottle. Oh, I don’t blame her! Paget, you’re smoking too many
cigarettes!”
“Not, I think, for the occasion,” he replied suavely. “Was Mrs.
Knyvett—she was upset, of course—but was she utterly surprised?”
“What makes you ask that, Paget?”
“Well, people generally show some signs of what they’re going to
do. One may miss the signs at the time, but it’s usually possible to
see them in retrospect, to interpret them after the event.”
“You mean that you can, or I can, or the Knyvett woman can?”
Aunt Bertha asked rather sharply.
“Never mind me for the minute. Did it affect her—this occurrence
—just as you might expect?”
“Why, yes, I should say so, Paget. The poor soul was completely
knocked over, flabbergasted, shocked out of her senses. But—well
now, upon my word, Paget! She did put one thing rather queerly.”
“Ah!” said Sir Paget. Waldo looked up with an awakened, though
still sullen, animation. I was listening with a lively interest; somehow
I felt sure that these two wise children of the world—what things
must they not have seen between them?—would get at something.
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