The Secret of the Silver Car Part 11

"I shan't be very long," Lady Daphne said laughing, "You will be able to smoke just two cigarettes, Mr. Castoon."

Castoon. Of course it was Rudolph Castoon the banker, the English born member of the great continental firm of bankers and financiers. One of the brothers was a leader among New York capitalists. It was said that each Castoon was loyal to the country where it had been arranged he should be born.

It was in the sweet smelling sitting room of the Ba.s.setts that Trent found her. She was standing up and refused to be seated. Her enmity now was hardly concealed.

"I find," she began, "that you have deceived me. You claimed to be one of the guns at Colonel Langley's shoot."

"I permitted you to a.s.sume it," he corrected, "but that is not an excuse."

"Colonel Langley is very anxious to know where it was I saw you and under what circ.u.mstances."

"You will hardly inform him as to that," said Trent smiling.

"If it becomes necessary I shall," she replied. "At all events I was in the house of a relative while you were there--"

"As a thief in the night. Thank you."

"You were there as a detective."

She had never seen him lose his calm before. He flushed red and a look of hatred came over his face.

"A detective! I? If you knew how I loathed them you would never suspect me of being that."

"If not why are you down here hounding my brother?"

"Hasn't he told you?"

"He says you persist in pretending to know him."

"Lady Daphne," Trent said earnestly. "Was your brother a Private William Smith, a gentleman ranker in the seventy-eighth battalion of the City of London Regiment?"

"Yes," she answered.

"And wasn't this same man under his own name expelled from Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge."

"Then you are a detective!" she cried.

"On my honor, no," he exclaimed. "Lady Daphne, your brother saved my life, and when I wanted to speak about the very terrible and unusual experience he denied knowing me."

"You are not telling me everything," she said after a pause, "I am glad you are not a detective even though you may be not what I thought you, but is it reasonable you should try to force yourself on a man who quite evidently wants to be alone with his thoughts just to thank him for doing something every soldier was glad to do for any other allied soldier?"

"There was something else," he admitted. "I may as well tell you what.

We were, as we had every reason to think, dying. We told each other part of our past lives. Why I don't pretend to understand. Nerves I suppose and the feeling that nothing mattered in the least. I told him part of my past which in effect put a club in his hand to use over me. When I got better I a.s.sumed he was killed. I found he wasn't and followed him here to ask what he was going to do with his knowledge. You wondered what errand I had at Dereham Old Hall. It was to read through the confession which you burned. I had read it and replaced it before you came in."

"Then you know all about him?" she gasped.

"I know what was written there," he answered. "I wanted to know so that I could tell him I, too, had a weapon with which to fight. I am not his enemy, far from it."

"You mean you don't want to threaten him or hold your knowledge of what he did over us?"

He looked at her gloomily. To think that this was the impression she had of him hurt.

"So that's what you think of me," he said slowly.

"Indeed it isn't," she answered quickly. "I didn't think it in the beginning and I don't want to do so now, but what was one to think?"

"It was your brother's behaviour that puzzled me," he said, "and still puzzles me. Don't you see I only want to be sure that he won't use what I told him?"

Lady Daphne looked at him curiously. Here was a man whose manners were perfect, who seemed to have the same sports and occupation of the kind of men she knew hinting that he had done things of whose consequence he was afraid. She supposed there were many temptations into which a man might fall, lapses of which he might repent and still go in fear of discovery.

"I don't wonder you were bewildered," she said presently, "and I understand far better than you how it was. Mr. Trent you need never be afraid that the man who was Private Smith will ever say a word to any living souls of what you said to him."

"How can I be certain?" he demanded. "You don't know the rewards that a man might gain for speaking the truth about me."

"Private William Smith and my brother Arthur are two different people."

He looked at her in astonishment. Was the weary chase, the long uncertainty to begin again? There was never a doubt in his mind but that what she told him was true even if it was hard to be believed.

"Then where is Private Smith?" he asked. "Where is the man who knows the real me?"

"At the castle," she said.

He made a gesture of despair.

"It is incomprehensible."

"I am going to tell you about them--about the two utterly different men." She said nothing for a full minute. Then she went to the door and called Mrs. Ba.s.sett into the room. "Please tell Mr. Castoon I shall have to keep him waiting rather longer than I thought."

"Certainly, my Lady," Mrs. Ba.s.sett said. Later she told her husband that Mr. Castoon looked very black at the news. "He's not the kind to like being kept waiting," she explained.

"Princes of the Blood ought to be glad to wait for Lady Daphne," the tenant farmer cried.

"You learned somehow that Arthur was expelled from Harrow. It is true.

He managed to get into Trinity but lasted only a term. Then came Sandhurst and a commission finally and black disgrace. Mr. Rudolph Castoon who is a friend of my eldest brother took pity on him and made him one of his secretaries--he's in Parliament you know--but even he couldn't do anything. Then a little while in Australia and failure there. The last thing he did was to enlist just before the war broke out. Colonel Langley was given the command of a London regiment and found Arthur under the name you knew."

"But you said he wasn't Private Smith," Trent broke in eagerly.

"You will see later what I mean. How did you meet him?"

Trent explained in a few words. But what confessions or boasts he had been betrayed into making he said nothing about.

"My brother was expelled from Harrow when he was eighteen. Until he was seventeen he was one of the sweetest natured boys you could imagine. He was full of fun and mischief but all his tutors loved him and there wasn't a particle of vice in him. Suddenly he seemed possessed of devils. He drank, he gambled--and cheated--he was insolent to his teachers. It broke my mother's heart. It helped to make my father the silent broken man he is today. It was the same when he went up to Trinity and the same when he was at Sandhurst...." There was a long pause. Trent could see she was struggling against tears. There welled up in him an almost divine pity. He wanted to soothe her, comfort her and let her cry on his shoulder.

It was in this moment that Anthony Trent knew he loved her and would always love her. Those pa.s.sing affections of adolescence were pale, wan emotions compared with this. And it was an hour of grief to him. He realized that his ways of life had cut him off irremediably from marriage with such a woman as this.

"What happened," she said at last, "when you came to after being blown from that dug-out?"

"I was badly hurt," he answered, wonderingly, "those high explosives play the strangest tricks with one."