The Sign of the Stranger Part 27

"A friend of yours?"

"No, not particularly," was her answer.

"Then if he is not, Lolita, why did I find you walking with him in the wood on that morning--I mean after the finding of the body of Hugh Wingfield?"

"You saw us?" she gasped, glaring at me aghast. "You followed us!"

"I saw you," I repeated. "And further, I met the man on the following night in Chelsea in company with Marie Lejeune. He was flying from the police."

"Yes, he has told me how, by your timely warning, he was saved."

"My warning also saved the Frenchwoman. She should, therefore, in return do you the service of telling the truth, and thus clearing you."

"Ah! She'll never do that, as I've told you. It would be against her own interests."

"But this man? Who is he?" I demanded, recollecting the confidential conversation between them before they had parted on the edge of the wood.

Both of us remembered how she had changed her wet, muddy dress at my house, and how I had succeeded in stealing a dress from her wardrobe and carrying it down to Sibberton. Yet no word of that curious incident had ever pa.s.sed between us. With mutual accord we had regarded the circ.u.mstance as one that had never occurred, nevertheless, at the cloak-room at St Pancras was a box filled with her boots, while locked away in an attic of my house was the muddy dinner-gown she had exchanged for her walking skirt on that memorable morning.

"You know his name?" she said, in response to my question.

"I do. But there are many circ.u.mstances connected with him which are puzzling," I said. "Among them is the reason of his concealment in the house of the farmer Hayes."

"Because he feared the police, I suppose. A watch was being kept on the house in Britten Street, you say."

"For what reason? What was the offence of the pair?"

"They were suspected--suspected of a crime," she replied. "But," she added, "their guilt or their innocence does not concern me. I alone am to be the victim," she added bitterly, pus.h.i.+ng her hair from her brow as if its weight oppressed her.

"Then this man Logan is your enemy--eh?"

"He is not my friend."

"He is in league with the others to encompa.s.s your ruin? Tell me the truth of this, at least."

"I have not yet exactly decided whether he is my enemy or my friend,"

was her answer. "Once he rendered me a very great service--how great I can never sufficiently acknowledge."

"And now?" I asked, remembering that secret sign in the window.

"I am at a loss what to think," was her response. "Sometimes I believe he is working in my interests, while at others I entertain a vague suspicion that he is my enemy."

"As he is Marie Lejeune's," I added, looking her straight in the face.

"Her enemy--why, he's her best friend. Their interests are identical."

"I think not," was my calm reply. And in a few brief sentences I related to her what had transpired at the lonely Northamptons.h.i.+re farm, how a murderous attack had been made upon "Miss Alice," as she was there called, and how the whole of the mysterious party had afterwards made good their escape from the neighbourhood.

"This is certainly surprising to me," she declared. "Whom do you suppose attacked her?"

"Pink's idea is that it was Logan."

"But Pink surely knows nothing about my connexion with those people?"

she exclaimed apprehensively.

"Nothing. Up to the present there is no suspicion whatsoever that you were acquainted with the dead man. Indeed his name is still unknown."

I recollected how the young fellow wore her portrait in his ring, and fell to wondering again if he were actually her secret lover, and if he had been the victim of another's jealousy.

She certainly escaped from the Hall that night and met some one in the park--but whom was an utter mystery. Yet there still sounded in my ears that scream I had heard--the scream that was certainly hers and which came from the scene of the tragedy. If she were not the actual a.s.sa.s.sin, then she had of a certainty borne witness of it--and had been appalled by that terrible _denouement_.

But when a man loves a woman as I loved Lolita, he cannot openly charge her with being a murderess. And yet how I longed and longed for strength to drive the demon suspicion from me; that fiend that sat hovering over my soul, affrighting every gleam that might afford me comfort.

"Then you have been loyal to me, Willoughby. You have kept your promise!" she exclaimed with a sad sweetness. "Would that you could rescue me from the cruel fate that must now be mine!"

I strove to speak, but utterance was denied me. She seemed so convinced of the hopelessness of the future that her very conviction seemed to carry upon it evidence of her guilt.

Could poor Hugh Wingfield, the man who had carried that secret cipher in his pocket and who had worn her portrait on his finger, have actually been struck down by that very hand that I had kissed?

Ah! no! Perish such a thought. She was my love--and my love was, I knew full well, the innocent victim of as foul and base a conspiracy as had ever been conceived by the ingenious mind of man.

I doubted her, but only on account of the character of the persons with whom she was in secret a.s.sociation. When I enumerated them in my mind I saw what a strange mysterious group they were--the young Frenchwoman, the man Logan, the two sallow-faced foreigners who had been diligent readers of socialistic newspapers, and, last of all, the rough-mannered hunter of big game, Smeeton, _alias_ Keene--the man over whom the young Countess of Stanchester appeared to possess some secret power.

Was Marigold the evil genius of the situation? Her past had been so full of adventure, and the rumours about her--mostly untrue be it said-- had been so many that I confess I felt inclined to prejudge and condemn her.

A vain, pretty married woman, fond of admiration and moving in the ultra-smart set, can seldom escape the evil tongue of gossip. Yet although I made every allowance for her social surroundings and the fact of her being one of "the giddy Gordons," there were certain facts of my own knowledge with which I could not well reconcile her position as my friend's wife. For that reason, as well as because of her open declaration of antagonism to Keene, I held her in suspicion. She had cleverly deceived me as to her real motive, and that was sufficient to cause me to regard her as an enemy.

"Why not admit this man Logan and let us consult together?" I suggested at last. "We might arrive at some way out of this deadly peril of yours."

"We might," she admitted. "But he would never meet and discuss the matter with you. Remember he is wanted by the police, and has no guarantee that you might not betray him. He told me of your meeting in Chelsea, how you raised the alarm, and how narrowly he escaped being captured. Therefore he views you with no great affection. No," she added, "for the present you must not meet. It would be unwise. He must not even know that you axe in Edinburgh."

"Why not?"

"Because--well, because if he knows you are here with me he will hesitate to act in the manner I am trying to induce him to act. Fear of you will prevent him."

"What are you inducing him to do?" I asked.

"I am trying to prevail upon him to a.s.sist me in performing a certain service--one by which I hope to gain my release from these torturing fears that hold me. It is my last resource. If my project fails, death alone remains to me."

She spoke with a deep breathless earnestness which told me plainly that her words were no idle ones. True she had spoken of self-destruction many times, but it was with the firm conviction of a woman hounded to her own destruction.

The world, curiously enough, regards a wealthy woman of t.i.tle as though she were a different being to themselves, believing her to possess attributes denied to the commoner, and a mind devoid of any of the cares of the weary workaday existence. Yet if the truth be told, the woman who is dressed by Laferrier, Raudnitz or Callot often has a far uglier skeleton in her cupboard than she who is compelled to go bargain-hunting in Oxford Street at sales for her next season's gown. The smart victoria, the matched pair, the liveried servants and the emblazoned panels form the necessary background of the woman who is _chic_, but, alas! how often she hates the very sight of all that hollow show of wealth and superiority, and how she longs for the quiet of obscurity.

How very true it is that wealth does not bring happiness; that there is no pleasure in this world without the gall of pain, that love finds sanctuary in the heart of the princess just as it does in that of the factory-girl. There is no peace on this side of eternity, therefore we must forever court the illusions which evade us.

What could I say? If it were to her interest to see this man alone-- this man of whom the police were in such active search--then to serve her I ought not to object. I felt indignant that my well-beloved should be polluted by the presence of such an adventurer, and yet I recollected how they had walked together in the wood, and what was more--that the man must be aware of her secret, whatever it was! He had walked and spoken to her; he had seen her, her white dress of the previous night wet, mud-stained and bedraggled--he must know, or at least guess, the truth!

Did she hold him in fear on that account? Was she beneath the thrall of this adventurer?